Written English, along with most modern tongues, is so deeply tied to its alphabet that we may take the pairing for granted. But long before Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales, there were alternatives. In fact, although the first evidence of writing comes from 5,000-year-old Sumerian cuneiform, it took another millennium for humans to hit upon the language-ordering method most of us now learn as children.
The language you’re reading here is a latecomer, with a long but traceable heritage. The alphabet seems to have been invented just once, by Semitic workers in Egypt nearly 4,000 years ago. The script they devised, known as Proto-Sinaitic script, was an attempt to repurpose hieroglyphics for their own language.
Egyptologists recovered the first of these inscriptions in the early decades of the 20th century, noting their clear hieroglyphic influence. They were found on the Sinai Peninsula, so scholars assumed that Proto-Sinaitic originated there, around ...
