The Egyptian Alphabet (1999)
In 1999, Yale University researchers John and Deborah Darnell found 4,000 year old Semitic writing on a cliffside near the Nile. These writings are the first known examples of ‘alphabetic writing,’ which would evolve into the hieroglyphics used by the ancient Egyptians. Alphabetic writing uses pictures or symbols to represent words; one letter represents one sound of a word, rather than communicating in pictographs, where an image stands for the entire word. It’s the difference between spelling ‘Cat,” with the letters c, a, and t each having a distinct sound to make the word, or drawing a picture of a cat to convey the meaning. The Darnell’s findings mean that Egyptian hieroglyphics developed about 300 years earlier than archaeologists believed.