Understanding Relations Between Scripts II

Early Alphabets

Philippa M. Steele, Philip J. Boyes, Philippa M. Steele, Philip J. Boyes

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789250930
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets is the first volume in this series, bringing together ten experts on ancient writing, languages and archaeology to present a set of diverse studies on the early development of alphabetic writing systems and their spread across the Levant and Mediterranean during the second and first millennia BC. By taking an interdisciplinary perspective, it sheds new light on alphabetic writing not just as a tool for recording language but also as an element of culture.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Issues in studying early alphabets

Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele

Within the Western world, the Alphabet (with a capital A) has become an icon of culture, knowledge and education.1 It is among the first things learned as part of a formal education and in the form of alphabet charts and abecedarian literature is visually and conceptually ubiquitous as young children are first forming an awareness of what education is. In a sense, the alphabet has come to be identified with that education. Knowing the alphabet, being literate in that specific writing system, is seen as a watershed in intellectual development; the achievement of a certain minimum standard for the participation in mainstream, civilised society.

Of course, this is true to differing degrees with any modern writing system that is taught within a formal educational infrastructure and it is not unique to alphabets that writing can become closely bound up in ideas of identity and educational status. However, the West’s historically-rooted cultural and political hegemony has allowed those socialised within it to normalise, privilege and arguably fetishise ‘the Alphabet’ in ways that are less open to users of writing systems without such a cross-cultural global reach and centuries of political and ideological dominance to back it up. For many, both in academia and the wider culture, the temptation has been to see alphabetic writing as the pinnacle of the development of human writing, with other writing systems either implicitly or explicitly relegated to primitive stages on the way, with corresponding implications for the societies that used and continue to use them.

For those of us who study alphabetic writing, we must walk the line between illuminating the history and importance of such scripts and fetishising them as part of a teleological and eurocentric historical and cultural narrative. Indeed, we must resist the very idea of ‘the Alphabet’ as a reified, single thing with a cohesive, unilinear evolutionary trajectory. As the contributions to this volume show, from the outset alphabets have been plural, fuzzy-edged and characterised by experimentation. Even the question of what constitutes alphabetic writing is less straightforward than it might initially appear. Does a script count as an alphabet if it only represents consonants and not vowels? Some would say not, but it would be inconceivable to discuss the history of alphabets without considering the consonantal Semitic systems of the Bronze and Iron Ages. And even modern orthographic systems, which we tend to think of as alphabets with full vowel repertoires, can also allow for additional signs which function outside the alphabetic system. Ideograms (signs which represent entire concepts or ideas) can be used, such as for numbers; or logograms, where the sign stands for a word, as in £ or $. Even the emojis which are now increasingly a feature of electronic communication can be seen as extra-alphabetic supplements to the writing system, sometimes specifying and clarifying the sense in which a word or sentence is to be read (like determinatives in other writing systems) or conveying other information on emotional or incidental context

. Similarly, writing systems which operate primarily along non-alphabetic lines may also include alphabetic elements, as Egyptian hieroglyphs did, or modern Japanese Rōmaji (employing Roman letters which supplement the already existing logographic and syllabic repertoires of the Japanese writing system).

Alphabets do not stand apart from and supersede other forms of writing, then, but co-exist with and blend into them. The contributions to this volume demonstrate that alphabetic writing can only be understood within the context of – and in relation to – other writing systems. This is true not just for the early period this volume is most concerned with, but throughout the history of alphabets, up to the present day. We will begin by looking in more detail at the questions of what alphabets are, then consider their early histories before moving on to explore what their importance and cultural impact has been, and how this has shaped, and continues to shape, research.

What is an alphabet?

As we have already seen, it is not necessarily obvious what counts as an ‘alphabet’ and what does not, and this depends in part on how we view the classification of writing systems. From a linguistic point of view, there are several ways in which the signs (or graphemes) of a writing system can be arranged to reflect the language represented, corresponding broadly to different ways of breaking the language up into units. The type of grapheme that is often thought of as the least analytical is the logogram, which stands for a whole word without breaking it up into smaller units, resulting in a writing system that could potentially consist of thousands of signs in order to allow full representation of the underlying language.2 In practice, however, writing systems with logographic signs typically employed other types of sign and/or could read the sign with a different type of value, like the logo-syllabic cuneiform systems of Mesopotamia or the combination of logography and phonography (the latter applied to signs representing individual sounds or combinations of sounds) found in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Other types of notation can break language into smaller units, or segments, for example a sign for a whole syllable or a sign for a single phoneme, the latter broadly categorised as alphabetic; in either case, this involves a further step in analysing language by sound units (whether whole syllables or individual phonemes) and so relies on an attempt to represent the phonological repertoire of a given language. Syllabic scripts typically have a larger repertoire of signs than alphabetic ones because more combinations of phoneme+phoneme(+phoneme) grouping are being represented, while an alphabetic script minimises the number of signs needed by narrowing down further to one sign per phoneme. Consonantal scripts, sometimes classified as ‘abjads’ (on which, see below), essentially analyse language units at the same level as those that are often referred to as ‘true alphabets’ (like the Greek and Roman ones), but the difference is the extent to which or way in which certain phonemes (in this case the vowels) are marked.

The famous evolutionary model of the development of writing espoused by Ignace Gelb (Gelb 1963, esp. 220 ff.), whereby logo-syllabic scripts gave way to syllabic scripts and they in turn gave way to alphabetic scripts, viewed the more analytical systems as essentially better than the less analytical systems, such that only unidirectional development along this trajectory was possible. He envisaged the history of writing as a journey from semasiographic pre-writing (pictures for concepts) via the rebus principle (recognising the sounds of the word represented in the picture) to various stages of phonography (logo-syllabic, syllabic and then alphabetic systems), with each step representing an improvement on earlier versions of writing. Gelb’s study was undoubtedly an important one that marked a turning point in scholarship on the history of writing, but even though its ambitious attempt to analyse and categorise different types of writing system sparked widespread new interest in this field of study, which Gelb named ‘grammatology’, its legacy was for a long time an overemphasis on the evolutionary principles Gelb advocated. Indeed, twentieth century eurocentric discourse on the Greek alphabet as a civilising vehicle, which in turn enabled the progress of human thought, owed a considerable debt to Gelb’s work (see below).

One of Gelb’s more peculiar claims was that the consonantal scripts used to write West Semitic languages (Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, etc.), and with them the phonographic component of Egyptian writing, were in some sense syllabic, since each sign took for granted the inclusion also of adjacent vowels (Gelb 1963, 147–153); the suggestion was followed by, and refined in, Swiggers 1984. The advantage for Gelb’s line of argumentation was that this would place the West Semitic consonantal scripts at an earlier stage in the evolution of writing, making the addition of dedicated vowel signs and the move towards a ‘true alphabet’ (the accomplishment of the Greeks in his view) the ultimate achievement and end goal of human literacy. But consonantal writing systems are significantly different from the syllabic systems with which Gelb tried to group them, a key difference being that syllabic systems (like the linear scripts of the Aegean or the cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia) will always specify the vowel involved in the syllable represented by a given sign, while the purely consonantal scripts entirely omit any indication of the presence or absence of vowels, as well as any specification of vowels that may be present in a given sequence.3

More recent work on writing systems has begun to redress the overemphasis on evolutionary principles found in Gelb’s work, but uncertainty or disagreement over the classification of types of system has lingered. Since we are particularly concerned here with the systems that encode language at the phonemic level (as opposed to syllabic or lexical), given that this is a volume themed around ‘Early Alphabets’, the different classifications proposed by Peter Daniels (Daniels 1990, 1992, 2006, 2018) cannot be overlooked. He separated ‘alphabets’, i.e. scripts with dedicated separate signs for vowel notation alongside consonant notation (containing ‘characters that denote all or most of the individual segments, the phonemes, of a language, both vocalic and consonantal’: Daniels 1990, 729), from two other types: scripts that denote consonants only and do not have signs for vowels (‘abjads’) and scripts that do have vowel notation but via some kind of diacritical marks rather than separate signs (‘abugidas’). The last category (‘abugidas’), represented by scripts such as Ge’ez or Devanagari, used for Ethiopic and Indian languages respectively, does indeed represent something slightly different from phonemic notation, because the sign to which a vowel-denoting diacritical mark is added starts with a basic syllabic value; this apparent mixture of phonemographic and syllabographic properties has given rise to other terms for such scripts, including ‘neo-syllabary’ (Février 1948) and the more prevalent ‘alpha-syllabary’ (Bright 1992, 2000). There have been many more attempts to create a typology of writing systems that distinguishes between such types effectively, usually with slightly different results each time; we have neither the space nor any intention to review or summarise this wealth of scholarship here.4

Whether or not phonemographic scripts with signs for both consonants and vowels are grouped together with scripts with signs for only consonants (not vowels) may appear from the to-ing and fro-ing of grammatological scholarship to be an entirely academic question; but there are some important underlying issues here, which also lie at the heart of our decision to group them both under the general heading of ‘alphabets’. The first is that, as we have seen, both types of script are based on language analysis at the level of individual phonemic units. If they differ in their extent of coverage of a given language’s phonemic repertoire, this can be observed to be more of a scale than an either/or scenario. For example, the Greek alphabet does not achieve full phonemic representation, given that phonemic vowel length is not distinguished in many early Greek alphabets; some West Semitic scripts do develop ways to write vowels (the system of matres lectionis used in Aramaic being a good example); the early Latin alphabet over-represents its velar phonemes with the allophonic C/K/Q signs; the modern English alphabet’s sign values show a very high degree of variation that has been strongly influenced by historical orthographic traditions (e.g. spellings reflecting older pronunciations and/or differing linguistic derivations); and so on. Even though the level of language analysis is at its basis the same, the script used for any one language is not a simple one-for-one phonemegrapheme correspondence; rather it is a product of choices about which phonemes need or do not need to be represented, which may in turn be driven by language-dependent motivations such as the need to avoid ambiguity (see Meillet 1919 and, on choices related to vowel representation specifically, Crellin Forthcoming).

A second issue, and one often overlooked in typological studies, is that writing is determined and affected by its social and cultural as well as its linguistic context. Militating against Gelb’s contention that alphabets are the ultimate evolutionary outcome of the human development of writing, there are numerous instances of syllabic writing systems developed from alphabets (such as the Palaeohispanic scripts) or used in spite of familiarity with alphabetic writing, both in the ancient world (see e.g. Steele 2018, chapter 5, on Cypriot writing) and more recently (for example the alpha-syllabaries used for Cree and other languages or the Cherokee syllabary). Indeed, very often we can observe that the choice to use, or the development of, a particular writing system is determined far less by a desire for faithful language representation than by the purposes for and contexts in which it is used. In the case of supposedly inefficient syllabic scripts, for instance, it has been pointed out that assumptions about their unwieldiness for a given language (e.g. that Linear B is ill suited for writing Greek) are often inaccurate or overstated and fail to take into account the social landscape in which documents written in them operated (see Consani 2017 on Linear B; also Consani 2003 and Miller 1994 on linguistic motivation for design of syllabic scripts). As we shall see later, however, previous scholarship surrounding the cultural importance of alphabetic writing itself needs to be revisited with a critical eye.

The historical development and spread of alphabetic writing systems in antiquity

The developmental trajectory of alphabetic writing has traditionally been something of a paradox, both well understood and rather ambiguous. There has never been any doubt that it came to Europe from the Levant – Herodotos clearly stated as much (Histories 5.58), and the Greeks referred to their own system as φοινικήια γράμματα – ‘Phoenician letters’. Subsequent studies, both pre-modern and modern, have amply demonstrated the correctness of the ancient view. Until comparatively recently, however, there was much less interest in the alphabet’s origins within the Levant – for many it was enough to know that it was Semitic in origin; the details of its invention were apparently of lesser importance to early modern scholarship (Delcor 1991).

Increasing light began to be shed on the origins of the alphabet in the late nineteenth and, especially, the early twentieth centuries. A key event was Flinders Petrie’s discovery of early alphabetic inscriptions (which, in common with later Semitic writing systems, only record consonants and do not write vowels) in the Bronze Age mine-workings of Serabiṭ el-Khadim in the Sinai peninsula. As Ben Haring illustrates in his contribution to this volume (pp. 53–67), while the date and translation of these texts remains subject to some controversy, it seems clear that these so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions represent an early stage of the Levantine linear alphabets from which the Phoenician script developed. The more recent discovery of additional inscriptions of similar kind in the Wadi el-Ḥôl of Egypt’s Western Desert (Darnell et al. 2005) confirms that these should be dated early; indeed, it pushes the likely date of the first creation of the alphabet back into the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, around the beginning of the second millennium BC. As Haring discusses, it is generally thought that these first alphabetic systems were created by Canaanite miners and soldiers who were drawing on and adapting ideas and signs from the Egyptian hieroglyphic and hieratic repertoires.

The development of the alphabet in the Levant during the second millennium BC remains ill-defined due to the rare and sporadic nature of the evidence (Finkelstein and Sass 2013; Sass 1988, 2004–5), but it is clear that this was a time of experimentation in which several related variants of linear alphabets were in use, and that they were gradually developing into the recognisable repertoire and sign-forms that would be standardised in early Phoenician around the turn of the first millennium BC.5 The processes of this standardisation are explored by Reinhard Lehmann in his chapter (pp. 69–90).

We should not, however, characterise the development of the alphabet in this period as straightforwardly, well … linear. Alongside the linear descendants of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, other writing systems were in use in the Levant – principally the logo-syllabic scripts of Mesopotamia and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The influence of these other writing systems contributed to attempts to take the idea of the alphabet in different directions. Perhaps the most notable example is the alphabetic cuneiform writing system of Ugarit, which blended influences of the linear alphabets with those of the Mesopotamian cuneiform tradition to create a unique system of its own. In her chapter in this volume, Silvia Ferrara (pp. 15–28) explores issues relating to the emergence of this system. While undoubtedly productive within Ugarit – being used for thousands of texts, incl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Issues in studying early alphabets: Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele
• 2. A ‘top-down’ re-invention of an old form: Cuneiform alphabets in context: Silvia Ferrara
• 3. Variation in alphabetic cuneiform: Rethinking the ‘Phoenician’ inscription from Sarepta: Philip J. Boyes
• 4. Ancient Egypt and the earliest known stages of alphabetic writing: Ben Haring
• 5. Much ado about an implement! – the Phoenicianising of Early Alphabetic: Reinhard G. Lehmann
• 6. Vowel representation in the Archaic Greek and Old Aramaic scripts: A comparative orthographic and phonological examination: Roger D. Woodard
• 7. Mother or sister? Rethinking the origins of the Greek alphabet and its relation to the other ‘western’ alphabets: Willemijn Waal
• 8. The development of Greek alphabets: Fluctuations and standardisations: Philippa M. Steele
• 9. Between scripts and languages: Inscribed intricacies from geometric and archaic Greek contexts: Giorgos Bourogiannis
• 10. The matter of voice – the Umbrian perspective: Karin W. Tikkanen
• 11. Writings in network? The case of Palaeohispanic scripts: Coline Ruiz Darasse
• Bibliography