The origin of our ABCs may have cultural roots dating back thousands of years. New research from the University of Cambridge is set to shed light on the social context of ancient shared writing systems.
The project, called Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS), explores how writing developed during the second and first millennia BCE in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The history of writing is believed to have surprising links to our modern day written culture.
"Alphabetical order," for example, was not invented by school teachers looking for an easy way to memorize their classroom seating chart. Used to organize everything from dictionaries to telephone books, alphabetical order first appeared more than 3,000 years ago in the ancient city of Ugaritic, written in a cuneiform script made of wedge-shaped signs impressed on clay tablets.
Evidence of the Ugaritic alphabet has been unearthed from Ras Shamra in modern Syria. Known as "abecedarian," surviving tablets depict letters of the alphabet arranged in order, perhaps representing teaching or training materials for new scribes.
However, the alphabetical order did not end with the destruction of Ugarit in 1200 BCE. The Phoenicians, living in what is now modern Syria and Lebanon, arranged their alphabet in the same way - but instead of cuneiform wedge shapes, the Phoenicians used linear letters.
What's more is that these linear letters - Alep, Bet, Gimel and Dalet - are remarkably similar to the A, B, C and D used in the English language today.
"The links from the ancient past to our alphabet today are no coincidence. The Greeks borrowed the Phoenician writing system and they still kept the same order of signs: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta," explained Philippa Steele, lead author from the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Classics. "They transported the alphabet to Italy, where it was passed on to the Etruscans, and also to the Romans, who still kept the same order: A, B, C, D, which is why our modern alphabet is the way it is today."
How such a seemingly simple idea has remained surprisingly stable and powerful over the course of thousands of years of cultural change and movement has remained somewhat of a historical mystery.
"The answer cannot be purely linguistic," Steele added. "There must have been considerable social importance attached to the idea of the alphabet having a particular order. It matters who was doing the writing and what they were using writing for."
Researchers also plan to explore the social and political context of writing, and drivers of language change, literacy and communication. Current theories suggest that the high level of interconnectedness facilitated the spread of ideas among Mediterranean and Near East cultures, as people moved around, traded and interacted with one another.
"Globalization is not a purely modern phenomenon," Steele said. "We might have better technology to pursue it now, but essentially we are engaging in the same activities as our ancestors."
Previously, Steele specialized in the languages of ancient Cyprus, which was largely influenced by Greek colonization in the 12th century BCE.
"Cyprus lies right in the middle of an area where ancient people were moving about by land and sea and swapping technologies and ideas," she explained. "That was one of the inspirations of the CREWS project. By studying how and what ancient people were writing, we will be able to gain more insight into their interactions with each other in ways that have never been fully understood before."
Research for the CREWS project is expected to run from April through 2021.
