Who Really Invented the Alphabet-Illiterate Miners or Educated Sophisticates? | Biblical Archaeology Review - 2 views
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. We must be careful not to be blinded by the genius of the invention of the alphabet, and assume, therefore, that such a breakthrough could be born only in the circles of highly educated scribes
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the inventors of the alphabet could not read Egyptian—neither hieroglyphs nor hieratic.
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The Semitic inventors of the alphabet found a new way of representing spoken language in script: Rather than capture whole words, they represented individual phonemes with icons. They were thus able to find a new solution for the picture-sound relationship. This leap in thought lead to a great innovation: a new, single, fixed relationship between picture and sound.
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