Marked Serabit el-Khadim, Sinai

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The alphabet

Almost every alphabet in use today, from Latin to Arabic, Hebrew and Greek, descends from one invented in Egypt or Sinai about 1900 BC by people who spoke a Semitic language, using a few dozen signs for sounds.

Place
Serabit el-Khadim, Sinai · Wadi el-Hol, Egypt · Byblos · UgaritThe whole world
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

BeforeWriting used hundreds of signs, and only trained scribes could read it.

  1. ISigns at Serabit el-Khadim
  2. IIThe Phoenician alphabet
  3. IIIThe Greeks add vowels
  4. IVFrom Aramaic to Arabic and Hebrew
  5. VABC: why the letters are in that order

AfterA few dozen letters, which anyone could learn.

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Flinders Petrie
  • Alan Gardiner

Objects

  • Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions
  • The sarcophagus of Ahiram
  • The Ugarit abecedary

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1900 BC to now. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?