Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 216

ORIGIN OF ALPHABET
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WHERE WAS THE ALPHABET INVENTED:
The nationality of the inventors of the proto-Semitic alphabet is unknown. The clue given by the significance of the traditional names (see below) of the letters is too slight: the eventually Aramaic form of these names in Greek is not decisive evidence, especially for such an early period. It is generally accepted that Semites (including also the Hebrews), Hurrians, Hittites and Indo-Iranians participated in the vast Hyksos movement; the Semitic elements, however, seem to have been dominant. It is hardly thinkable that the alphabet was invented by the Hyksos ruler-classes, as no evidence has come from Egypt, but there is no doubt that the upheaval brought about by the Hyksos movement might have induced some local population to create a "non-monopolistic" means of communication.
Palestine and Syria, as everyone knows, formed a sort of bridge uniting the great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Syrian littoral is now known to have had a highly developed culture in the second millennium a.c. and a well-organized and active priestly literary school. Traders were constantly passing through these countries, and the lands changed hands a number of times at different periods of their history. For many years large Egyptian trading posts had been established on various Palestinian and Syrian sites. Clay tablets in cuneiform writing discovered in scattered places both in Palestine and Syria, testify to constant Mesopotamian influence. Hittites had likewise made their culture felt. Here was a country known also to have been subjected to many influences from the west; from Crete, Cyprus, and later on from Greece. "There was always an active movement of cultural elements tending to create an almost imperceptiblesynthesis. Having received various elements of culture from every surrounding region in the southwest (Egypt), in the northeast (Mesopotamia), in the north (Anatolia), and in the west (Crete, Cyprus and Greece), Syria and Palestine handed those elements on, somewhat altered as a rule, to other contiguous regions.
It is not in Sinni, the mountain desert region, that the origin of our alphabet is to be soughr: the Palestinian scholar Dr. Yeivin is certainly right when he points out in his criticism of my theory that many prophets were born in little towns far away from international commercial routes or in desert villages; he seems, however, to have overlooked the difference between the divine and philosophical thoughts of the prophets and the extremely practical purposes of the alphabet. At any rate, it is quite evident that Palestine and Syria offered all the required conditions for the invention and the elaboration of alphabetic writing. A. Levy (90 years ago), M. Lidzbarski, E. J. Pilcher and F. Prætorius, already considered the alphabet, partly at least, as the invention of the local population of Syria-Palestine. More recently, this theory has found