Who Invented the Alphabet?

[Imperial Dave]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inventing-alphabet-180976520/

came across this....worth a squint

[DBS]

Thank you for that, interesting.  Must admit I am a bit sceptical about the theory presented; the intrinsic problem is how does one date this?  The evidence clearly suggests Asiatic miners, but when in the Egyptian period?  Did they invent the script whilst toiling in the mines, or did they bring it with them?  To say that Egyptian scribes could not be involved because of a 600 year gap in evidence requires one to assume first that one has dated the inscriptions accurately to establish that there is a six century gap, and secondly that their is not simply an accident in preservation of what would probably be, from a scribal perspective, very much secondary or tertiary output.  After all, most of the Akkadian scripts from Egyptian scribes have been found outside of the country - I think the Amarna finds are pretty much the only in-country examples - and are, I believe, almost entirely limited to the medium of clay tablets.  If it were not for the accident that clay tablets were so well preserved by fires, would we have any basis for thinking that some Egyptian scribes frequently wrote in Akkadian?

[Ian61]

Assuming Canaanite is equivalent to the Greek Phoenician then this seems to agree with Herodotus who claimed the Phoenicians had introduced writing to the Greeks (pause to check wiki) a chap called Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years earlier (around 2000 BC). Having only hard copy not a searchable text I am not rereading now but I am sure that somewhere he credits the city of Byblos with the invention of both the alphabet and the keeled boat. I am sure some of the experts who read this will shake their heads sadly and tell me I have misremembered but I have always liked the idea that as the Phoenicians were great traders it was useful to have a phonetic alphabet to write down trade agreements in different languages including ones that did not have a writing of their own. If a few Canaanites ended up in Egyptian mines well why not scratch the writing they knew.

[Ian61]

Book 5 from 58 Herodotus refers to the Ionian Greeks adopting and altering the Phoenician letters for their own use but still referring to them as Phoenician but I can't find the Byblos ref. does it exist anywhere outside my imagination?

[Andreas Johansson]

I don't know if Herodotus credits the city with the invention of the alphabet, but we owe words like "Bible" and "bibliography" to the Greeks importing papyrus from there.

That the Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician one is utterly uncontroversial, though Herodotus' dating is much too early.

[Jim Webster]

Book 5 from 58 Herodotus refers to the Ionian Greeks adopting and altering the Phoenician letters for their own use but still referring to them as Phoenician but I can't find the Byblos ref. does it exist anywhere outside my imagination?

If it's any consolation Byblos does ring a bell with me