Our Modern English Alphabet Has Ancient Cultural Roots: Study

The English alphabet seems to have ancient cultural roots that go back to thousands of years. Scientists from the University of Cambridge are getting an insight into the social context of ancient shared writing systems.

The Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) Project is studying how writing developed in the second and first millennia BCE in Mediterranean and Near East regions. This history of writing had significant links with modern day written culture.

"Alphabetical order" began 3,000 years ago in the ancient city of Ugaritic, written in a cuneiform script that was made of wedge-shaped signs on clay tablets.

The Ugaritic alphabet was disinterred from Ras Shamra in modern Syria. Called "abecedarian," the tablets show letters of the alphabet in an order, representing teaching or training materials for new scribes.

The Ugarit was destroyed in 1200 BCE, but the Phoenicians, who live now in Syria and Lebanon, arranged their alphabets in the same order, but used linear letters, not cuneiform wedge shapes.

The linear letters, ie Alep, Bet, Gimel and Dalet, look remarkably like the A, B, C and D of our own English language.

"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 did the simple idea survive through centuries of movement and change?

"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."

"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."

Research for the CREWS project  is expected to run from April through 2021.