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108-636: These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to describe the initial sound of *ʾalp , the West Semitic word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew אֶלֶף ‎ ʾelef , "ox"). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha ( Α ), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel , and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А . Phonetically , aleph originally represented

216-442: A logogram defines the object of which it is an image. Logograms are therefore the most frequently used common nouns; they are always accompanied by a mute vertical stroke indicating their status as a logogram (the usage of a vertical stroke is further explained below); in theory, all hieroglyphs would have the ability to be used as logograms. Logograms can be accompanied by phonetic complements. Here are some examples: In some cases,

324-559: A pintail duck is read in Egyptian as sꜣ , derived from the main consonants of the Egyptian word for this duck: 's', 'ꜣ' and 't'. (Note that ꜣ or [REDACTED] , two half-rings opening to the left, sometimes replaced by the digit '3', is the Egyptian alef . ) It is also possible to use the hieroglyph of the pintail duck without a link to its meaning in order to represent the two phonemes s and ꜣ , independently of any vowels that could accompany these consonants, and in this way write

432-705: A stylus , their forms are mostly angular and straight, though cursive forms increased in use over time, culminating in the Neo-Punic alphabet used in Roman North Africa . The earliest known proto-alphabetic inscriptions are the Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai Peninsula and in Canaan in the late Middle and Late Bronze Age . The script was not widely used until

540-528: A Latin K; a cursive Aramaic form he calls the "elaborated X-form", essentially the same tradition as the Hebrew reflex ; and an extremely cursive form of two crossed oblique lines, much like a simple Latin X. Hebrew spelling: אָלֶף ‎ In Modern Israeli Hebrew , the letter either represents a glottal stop ( [ ʔ ] ) or indicates a hiatus (the separation of two adjacent vowels into distinct syllables , with no intervening consonant ). It

648-572: A combination of two 10-tacks, approximately Z-shaped. Larger multiples of ten were formed by grouping the appropriate number of 20s and 10s. There existed several glyph variants for 100 (𐤙). The 100 symbol could be multiplied by a preceding numeral, e.g. the combination of 4 and 100 yielded 400. The system did not contain a numeral zero . Phoenician was prolific. Many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, so ultimately to Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Latin , Cyrillic , Armenian and Georgian scripts are derived from

756-622: A little after Sumerian script , and, probably, [were] invented under the influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia ". Further, Egyptian writing appeared suddenly, while Mesopotamia had a long evolutionary history of the usage of signs—for agricultural and accounting purposes—in tokens dating as early back to c.  8000 BC . However, more recent scholars have held that "the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy" and that "a very credible argument can also be made for

864-631: A mature writing system used for monumental inscription in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom period; during this period, the system used about 900 distinct signs. The use of this writing system continued through the New Kingdom and Late Period , and on into the Persian and Ptolemaic periods. Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period , extending into

972-628: A noun is recorded from 1590, originally short for nominalized hieroglyphic (1580s, with a plural hieroglyphics ), from adjectival use ( hieroglyphic character ). The Nag Hammadi texts written in Sahidic Coptic call the hieroglyphs "writings of the magicians, soothsayers" ( Coptic : ϩⲉⲛⲥϩⲁⲓ̈ ⲛ̄ⲥⲁϩ ⲡⲣⲁⲛ︦ϣ︦ ). Hieroglyphs may have emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from c.  4000 BC have been argued to resemble hieroglyphic writing. Proto-writing systems developed in

1080-415: A unique reading. For example, the symbol of "the seat" (or chair): Finally, it sometimes happens that the pronunciation of words might be changed because of their connection to Ancient Egyptian: in this case, it is not rare for writing to adopt a compromise in notation, the two readings being indicated jointly. For example, the adjective bnj , "sweet", became bnr . In Middle Egyptian, one can write: which

1188-463: A word. Where alif acts as a carrier for hamza, hamza is added above the alif, or, for initial alif- kasrah , below it and indicates that the letter so modified is indeed a glottal stop, not a long vowel. A second type of hamza, hamzat waṣl ( همزة وصل ) whose diacritic is normally omitted outside of sacred texts, occurs only as the initial letter of the definite article and in some related cases. It differs from hamzat qaṭ‘ in that it

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1296-537: Is a further derivation from Sogdian. The Arabic script is a medieval cursive variant of Nabataean , itself an offshoot of Aramaic. It has been proposed, notably by Georg Bühler (1898), that the Brahmi script of India (and by extension the derived Indic alphabets ) was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script, which would make Phoenician the ancestor of virtually every alphabetic writing system in use today, with

1404-502: Is a regional variant of the Phoenician alphabet, so called when used to write early Hebrew . The Samaritan alphabet is a development of Paleo-Hebrew, emerging in the 6th century BC. The South Arabian script may be derived from a stage of the Proto-Sinaitic script predating the mature development of the Phoenician alphabet proper. The Geʽez script developed from South Arabian. The Phoenician alphabet continued to be used by

1512-486: Is added between consonants to aid in their pronunciation. For example, nfr "good" is typically written nefer . This does not reflect Egyptian vowels, which are obscure, but is merely a modern convention. Likewise, the ꜣ and ꜥ are commonly transliterated as a , as in Ra ( rꜥ ). Hieroglyphs are inscribed in rows of pictures arranged in horizontal lines or vertical columns. Both hieroglyph lines as well as signs contained in

1620-462: Is almost impossible to understand because they are not related to any living languages. While Gómez-Moreno first pointed to a joined Phoenician-Greek origin, following authors consider that their genesis has no relation to Greek. The most remote script of the group is the Tartessian or Southwest script which could be one or several different scripts. The main bulk of PH inscriptions use, by far,

1728-539: Is controversial, engraved on the sarcophagus of king Ahiram in Byblos, Lebanon, one of five known Byblian royal inscriptions , shows essentially the fully developed Phoenician script, although the name "Phoenician" is by convention given to inscriptions beginning in the mid-11th century BC. Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet thrived, including Greek , Old Italic and Anatolian scripts. The alphabet's attractive innovation

1836-497: Is derived from Italic, the Cyrillic alphabet from medieval Greek. The Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic scripts are derived from Aramaic (the latter as a medieval cursive variant of Nabataean ). Ge'ez is from South Arabian . Phoenician used a system of acrophony to name letters: a word was chosen with each initial consonant sound, and became the name of the letter for that sound. These names were not arbitrary: each Phoenician letter

1944-512: Is derived from the Phoenician. With a different phonology, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script to represent their own sounds, including the vowels absent in Phoenician. It was possibly more important in Greek to write out vowel sounds: Phoenician being a Semitic language, words were based on consonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without loss of meaning, a feature absent in

2052-451: Is elided after a preceding vowel. Alif is always the carrier. The alif maddah is a double alif, expressing both a glottal stop and a long vowel. Essentially, it is the same as a أا sequence: آ (final ـآ ) ’ā /ʔaː/ , for example in آخر ākhir /ʔaːxir/ 'last'. "It has become standard for a hamza followed by a long ā to be written as two alifs , one vertical and one horizontal." (the "horizontal" alif being

2160-559: Is fully read as bnr , the j not being pronounced but retained in order to keep a written connection with the ancient word (in the same fashion as the English language words through , knife , or victuals , which are no longer pronounced the way they are written.) Besides a phonetic interpretation, characters can also be read for their meaning: in this instance, logograms are being spoken (or ideograms ) and semagrams (the latter are also called determinatives). A hieroglyph used as

2268-443: Is not excluded, but probably reflects the reality." Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs: phonetic glyphs, including single-consonant characters that function like an alphabet ; logographs , representing morphemes ; and determinatives , which narrow down the meaning of logographic or phonetic words. As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in

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2376-430: Is sometimes silent (word-finally always, word-medially sometimes: הוּא ‎ [hu] "he", רָאשִׁי ‎ [ʁaˈʃi] "main", רֹאשׁ ‎ [ʁoʃ] "head", רִאשׁוֹן ‎ [ʁiˈʃon] "first"). The pronunciation varies in different Jewish ethnic divisions . In gematria , aleph represents the number 1, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years , it means 1000 (e.g. א'תשנ"ד ‎ in numbers would be

2484-558: Is the numeral 3 , or the Middle English character ȝ Yogh ; neither are to be preferred to the genuine Egyptological characters. Written as ا or 𐪑, spelled as ألف or 𐪑𐪁𐪐 and transliterated as alif , it is the first letter in Arabic and North Arabian . Together with Hebrew aleph, Greek Α and Latin A , it is descended from Phoenician ʾāleph , from a reconstructed Proto-Canaanite ʾalp "ox". Alif has

2592-474: Is the subject of some controversy, though it had become well established by the late stage of Old Aramaic (ca. 200 BCE). Aleph is often transliterated as U+02BE ʾ MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING , based on the Greek spiritus lenis ʼ ; for example, in the transliteration of the letter name itself, ʾāleph . The name aleph is derived from the West Semitic word for " ox " (as in

2700-456: Is used in word-initial position to mark a word beginning with a vowel, but some words beginning with i or u do not need its help, and sometimes, an initial alap/olaph is elided . For example, when the Syriac first-person singular pronoun ܐܸܢܵܐ is in enclitic positions, it is pronounced no/na (again west/east), rather than the full form eno/ana . The letter occurs very regularly at

2808-465: Is used to render a glottal stop /ʔ/ . In the Ge'ez alphabet , ʾälef አ appears as the thirteenth letter of its abjad. This letter is also used to render a glottal stop /ʔ/ . In set theory , the Hebrew aleph glyph is used as the symbol to denote the aleph numbers , which represent the cardinality of infinite sets. This notation was introduced by mathematician Georg Cantor . In older mathematics books,

2916-703: Is written in Egypt, Sudan and sometimes elsewhere. The letter is transliterated as y in Kazakh , representing the vowel / ə /. Alif maqsurah is transliterated as á in ALA-LC , ā in DIN 31635 , à in ISO 233-2, and ỳ in ISO 233 . In Arabic, alif maqsurah ى is not used initially or medially, and it is not joinable initially or medially in any font. However,

3024-504: The /θ/ sound was lost. A few uniliterals first appear in Middle Egyptian texts. Besides the uniliteral glyphs, there are also the biliteral and triliteral signs, to represent a specific sequence of two or three consonants, consonants and vowels, and a few as vowel combinations only, in the language. Egyptian writing is often redundant: in fact, it happens very frequently that a word is followed by several characters writing

3132-741: The Arabic alphabet . The Hebrew alphabet emerges in the Second Temple period , from around 300 BC, out of the Aramaic alphabet used in the Persian empire. There was, however, a revival of the Phoenician mode of writing later in the Second Temple period, with some instances from the Qumran Caves , such as the Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC. By the 5th century BC, among Jews

3240-653: The Early Iron Age , sub-categorized by historians as Phoenician , Hebrew , Moabite , Ammonite and Edomite , as well as Old Aramaic . It was widely disseminated outside of the Canaanite sphere by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean, where it was adopted and adapted by other cultures. The Phoenician alphabet proper was used in Ancient Carthage until the 2nd century BC, where it

3348-568: The Greek adjective ἱερογλυφικός ( hieroglyphikos ), a compound of ἱερός ( hierós 'sacred') and γλύφω ( glýphō '(Ι) carve, engrave'; see glyph ) meaning sacred carving. The glyphs themselves, since the Ptolemaic period , were called τὰ ἱερογλυφικὰ [γράμματα] ( tà hieroglyphikà [grámmata] ) "the sacred engraved letters", the Greek counterpart to the Egyptian expression of mdw.w-nṯr "god's words". Greek ἱερόγλυφος meant "a carver of hieroglyphs". In English, hieroglyph as

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3456-537: The Greek alphabet , which evolved from Phoenician; the Aramaic alphabet , also descended from Phoenician, evolved into the Arabic and Hebrew scripts. It has also been theorised that the Brahmi and subsequent Brahmic scripts of the Indian cultural sphere also descended from Aramaic, effectively uniting most of the world's writing systems under one family, although the theory is disputed. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

3564-506: The Hebrew word emet ( אֶמֶת ‎), which means truth . In Judaism, it was the letter aleph that was carved into the head of the golem that ultimately gave it life. Aleph also begins the three words that make up God's name in Exodus , I Am who I Am (in Hebrew , Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh אהיה אשר אהיה ), and aleph is an important part of mystical amulets and formulas. Aleph represents

3672-586: The Indo-European Greek. However, Akkadian cuneiform , which wrote a related Semitic language, did indicate vowels, which suggests the Phoenicians simply accepted the model of the Egyptians, who never wrote vowels. In any case, the Greeks repurposed the Phoenician letters of consonant sounds not present in Greek; each such letter had its name shorn of its leading consonant, and the letter took

3780-567: The Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek, and possibly the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic. The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-literate symbol systems in the Early Bronze Age c.  the 33rd century BC ( Naqada III ), with the first decipherable sentence written in the Egyptian language dating to the 28th century BC ( Second Dynasty ). Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs developed into

3888-750: The Northeastern Iberian script , which serves to write Iberian in the levantine coast North of Contestania and in the valle of the river Ebro (Hiber). The Iberic language is also recorded using two other scripts: the Southeastern Iberian script , which is more similar to the Southwest script than to Northeastern Iberian; and a variant of the Ionic Greek Alphabet called the Greco-Iberian alphabet . Finally,

3996-471: The Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet . Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet , the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic scripts that descended from Phoenician, the majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs—most prominently

4104-527: The Samaritans and developed into the Samaritan alphabet, that is an immediate continuation of the Phoenician script without intermediate non-Israelite evolutionary stages. The Samaritans have continued to use the script for writing both Hebrew and Aramaic texts until the present day. A comparison of the earliest Samaritan inscriptions and the medieval and modern Samaritan manuscripts clearly indicates that

4212-653: The Second Dynasty (28th or 27th century BC). Around 800 hieroglyphs are known to date back to the Old Kingdom , Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Eras. By the Greco-Roman period, there were more than 5,000. Scholars have long debated whether hieroglyphs were "original", developed independently of any other script, or derivative. Original scripts are very rare. Previously, scholars like Geoffrey Sampson argued that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence

4320-556: The alif represents the glottal stop pronunciation when it is the initial letter of a word. In texts with diacritical marks, the pronunciation of an aleph as a consonant is rarely indicated by a special marking, hamza in Arabic and mappiq in Tiberian Hebrew. In later Semitic languages, aleph could sometimes function as a mater lectionis indicating the presence of a vowel elsewhere (usually long). When this practice began

4428-432: The hieratic (priestly) and demotic (popular) scripts. These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus . Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed alongside the other forms, especially in monumental and other formal writing. The Rosetta Stone contains three parallel scripts – hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule (intermittent in

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4536-511: The history of writing systems , the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction —while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age , which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Phoenician alphabet was used to write Canaanite languages spoken during

4644-441: The maddah sign). The ى ('limited/restricted alif', alif maqṣūrah ), commonly known in Egypt as alif layyinah ( ألف لينة , 'flexible alif'), may appear only at the end of a word. Although it looks different from a regular alif , it represents the same sound /aː/ , often realized as a short vowel. When it is written, alif maqṣūrah is indistinguishable from final Persian ye or Arabic yā’ as it

4752-437: The "goose" hieroglyph ( zꜣ ) representing the word for "son". A half-dozen Demotic glyphs are still in use, added to the Greek alphabet when writing Coptic . Knowledge of the hieroglyphs had been lost completely in the medieval period. Early attempts at decipherment were made by some such as Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya (9th and 10th century, respectively). All medieval and early modern attempts were hampered by

4860-618: The "myth of allegorical hieroglyphs" was ascendant. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in 391 by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I ; the last known inscription is from Philae , known as the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom , from 394. The Hieroglyphica of Horapollo (c. 5th century) appears to retain some genuine knowledge about the writing system. It offers an explanation of close to 200 signs. Some are identified correctly, such as

4968-439: The 11th century. The oldest inscriptions are dated to the 10th century. The Phoenician alphabet was deciphered in 1758 by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy , but its relation to the Phoenicians remained unknown until the 19th century. It was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs , which were deciphered by Champollion in the early 19th century. However, scholars could not find any link between

5076-787: The 1820s by Jean-François Champollion , with the help of the Rosetta Stone . The entire Ancient Egyptian corpus , including both hieroglyphic and hieratic texts, is approximately 5 million words in length; if counting duplicates (such as the Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts ) as separate, this figure is closer to 10 million. The most complete compendium of Ancient Egyptian, the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache , contains 1.5–1.7 million words. The word hieroglyph comes from

5184-566: The 3rd century BC (although some letter shapes did not become standard until the 1st century AD). The Kharosthi script is an Aramaic-derived alphasyllabary used in the Indo-Greek Kingdom in the 3rd century BC. The Syriac alphabet is the derived form of Aramaic used in the early Christian period. The Sogdian alphabet is derived from Syriac. It is in turn an ancestor of the Old Uyghur . The Manichaean alphabet

5292-459: The 4th century AD. During the 5th century, the permanent closing of pagan temples across Roman Egypt ultimately resulted in the ability to read and write hieroglyphs being forgotten. Despite attempts at decipherment, the nature of the script remained unknown throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period . The decipherment of hieroglyphic writing was finally accomplished in

5400-473: The 6th and 5th centuries BCE), and after Alexander the Great 's conquest of Egypt, during the ensuing Ptolemaic and Roman periods. It appears that the misleading quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part, as a response to the changed political situation. Some believed that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish 'true Egyptians ' from some of

5508-502: The Biblical Hebrew word Eleph (אֶלֶף) 'ox'), and the shape of the letter derives from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph that may have been based on an Egyptian hieroglyph , which depicts an ox's head. In Modern Standard Arabic , the word أليف /ʔaliːf/ literally means 'tamed' or 'familiar', derived from the root ʔ-L-F , from which the verb ألِف /ʔalifa/ means 'to be acquainted with; to be on intimate terms with'. In modern Hebrew,

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5616-459: The Common Era. According to Herodotus , the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet— phoinikeia grammata 'Phoenician letters'—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet . Herodotus claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus. He estimates that Cadmus lived 1600 years before his time, while

5724-714: The Greeks kept approximations of the Phoenician names, albeit they did not mean anything to them other than the letters themselves; on the other hand, the Latins (and presumably the Etruscans from whom they borrowed a variant of the Western Greek alphabet ) and the Orthodox Slavs (at least when naming the Cyrillic letters, which came to them from the Greek by way of the Glagolitic ) based their names purely on

5832-539: The Hebrew date 1754, not to be confused with 1754 CE). Aleph, along with ayin , resh , he and heth , cannot receive a dagesh . (However, there are few very rare examples of the Masoretes adding a dagesh or mappiq to an aleph or resh. The verses of the Hebrew Bible for which an aleph with a mappiq or dagesh appears are Genesis 43:26, Leviticus 23:17, Job 33:21 and Ezra 8:18.) In Modern Hebrew,

5940-628: The Latin alphabet itself, some early Old Italic alphabet via the Alpine scripts, or the Greek alphabet. Despite this debate, the Runic alphabet is clearly derived from one or more scripts that ultimately trace their roots back to the Phoenician alphabet. The Coptic alphabet is mostly based on the mature Greek alphabet of the Hellenistic period , with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at

6048-490: The Phoenician alphabet had been mostly replaced by the Aramaic alphabet as officially used in the Persian empire (which, like all alphabetical writing systems, was itself ultimately a descendant of the Proto-Canaanite script, though through intermediary non-Israelite stages of evolution). The " Jewish square-script " variant now known simply as the Hebrew alphabet evolved directly out of the Aramaic script by about

6156-402: The Phoenician letter was called bet and had the sound value b . According to a 1904 theory by Theodor Nöldeke , some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script. This includes: Yigael Yadin (1963) went to great lengths to prove that there was actual battle equipment similar to some of the original letter forms named for weapons (samek, zayin). Later,

6264-465: The Phoenician letters for those consonants as well.) The Alphabets of Asia Minor are generally assumed to be offshoots of archaic versions of the Greek alphabet. The Latin alphabet was derived from Old Italic (originally derived from a form of the Greek alphabet), used for Etruscan and other languages. The origin of the Runic alphabet is disputed: the main theories are that it evolved either from

6372-467: The Samaritan script is a static script which was used mainly as a book hand . The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic , is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off into a number of related alphabets, including Hebrew , Syriac , and Nabataean , the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of

6480-593: The alphabet into parts of North Africa and Southern Europe. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos (in present-day Lebanon ) and Carthage in North Africa. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt. The alphabet had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. Its simplicity not only allowed its easy adaptation to multiple languages, but it also allowed

6588-476: The classical notion that the Mesopotamian symbol system predates the Egyptian one. A date of c.  3400 BCE for the earliest Abydos glyphs challenges the hypothesis of diffusion from Mesopotamia to Egypt, pointing to an independent development of writing in Egypt. Rosalie David has argued that the debate is moot since "If Egypt did adopt the idea of writing from elsewhere, it was presumably only

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6696-468: The common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of literacy as an exclusive achievement of royal and religious elites, scribes who used their monopoly on information to control the common population. The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms, such as Assyria , Babylonia and Adiabene , would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into

6804-444: The concept which was taken over, since the forms of the hieroglyphs are entirely Egyptian in origin and reflect the distinctive flora, fauna and images of Egypt's own landscape." Egyptian scholar Gamal Mokhtar argued further that the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from "fauna and flora used in the signs [which] are essentially African" and in "regards to writing, we have seen that a purely Nilotic, hence African origin not only

6912-504: The consonant-only Phoenician letters. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact match to Greek sounds were used. The Ionic variant evolved into the standard Greek alphabet, and the Cumae variant into the Italic alphabets (including the Latin alphabet ). The Runic alphabet

7020-401: The end of words, where it represents the long final vowels o/a or e . In the middle of the word, the letter represents either a glottal stop between vowels (but West Syriac pronunciation often makes it a palatal approximant ), a long i/e (less commonly o/a ) or is silent. In the Ancient South Arabian alphabet , 𐩱 appears as the seventeenth letter of the South Arabian abjad. The letter

7128-477: The first person pronoun I . Phonograms formed with one consonant are called uniliteral signs; with two consonants, biliteral signs; with three, triliteral signs. Twenty-four uniliteral signs make up the so-called hieroglyphic alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing does not normally indicate vowels, unlike cuneiform , and for that reason has been labelled by some as an abjad , i.e., an alphabet without vowels. Thus, hieroglyphic writing representing

7236-454: The foreign conquerors. Another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms, which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally. Having learned that hieroglyphs were sacred writing, Greco-Roman authors imagined the complex but rational system as an allegorical, even magical, system transmitting secret, mystical knowledge. By the 4th century CE, few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs, and

7344-402: The formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language . Hieroglyphs combined ideographic , logographic , syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was

7452-405: The frequency of the usage of alef, out of all the letters, is 4.94%. Aleph is sometimes used as a mater lectionis to denote a vowel, usually /a/ . That use is more common in words of Aramaic and Arabic origin, in foreign names, and some other borrowed words. Aleph is the subject of a midrash that praises its humility in not demanding to start the Bible. (In Hebrew , the Bible begins with

7560-425: The fundamental assumption that hieroglyphs recorded ideas and not the sounds of the language. As no bilingual texts were available, any such symbolic 'translation' could be proposed without the possibility of verification. It was not until Athanasius Kircher in the mid 17th century that scholars began to think the hieroglyphs might also represent sounds. Kircher was familiar with Coptic, and thought that it might be

7668-408: The highest frequency out of all 28 letters in the Arabic abjad . Alif is also the most used letter in Arabic. Alif is written in one of the following ways depending on its position in the word: The Arabic letter was used to render either a long /aː/ or a glottal stop /ʔ/ . That led to orthographical confusion and to the introduction of the additional marking hamzat qaṭ‘ ﺀ to fix

7776-501: The historical adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks was barely 350 years before Herodotus. The Phoenician alphabet was known to the Jewish sages of the Second Temple era , who called it the "Old Hebrew" ( Paleo-Hebrew ) script. The conventional date of 1050 BC for the emergence of the Phoenician script was chosen because there is a gap in the epigraphic record; there are not actually any Phoenician inscriptions securely dated to

7884-422: The independent development of writing in Egypt..." While there are many instances of early Egypt-Mesopotamia relations , the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing means that "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt". Since the 1990s, the above-mentioned discoveries of glyphs at Abydos , dated to between 3400 and 3200 BCE, have shed further doubt on

7992-422: The initial creation of new alphabets and from gradual pronunciation changes which did not immediately lead to spelling changes. The Phoenician letter forms shown are idealized: actual Phoenician writing is less uniform, with significant variations by era and region. When alphabetic writing began, with the early Greek alphabet , the letter forms were similar but not identical to Phoenician, and vowels were added to

8100-442: The key to deciphering the hieroglyphs, but was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols. The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon 's troops in 1799 (during Napoleon's Egyptian invasion ). As the stone presented a hieroglyphic and a demotic version of the same text in parallel with a Greek translation, plenty of material for falsifiable studies in translation

8208-550: The left, they almost always must be read from left to right, and vice versa. As in many ancient writing systems, words are not separated by blanks or punctuation marks. However, certain hieroglyphs appear particularly common only at the end of words, making it possible to readily distinguish words. The Egyptian hieroglyphic script contained 24 uniliterals (symbols that stood for single consonants, much like letters in English). It would have been possible to write all Egyptian words in

8316-558: The letter aleph is often printed upside down by accident, partly because a Monotype matrix for aleph was mistakenly constructed the wrong way up. The Mapai political party in Israel used an aleph as its election symbol, and featured it prominently in its campaign posters. ʾ b g d h w z ḥ Egyptian hieroglyph Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( / ˈ h aɪ r oʊ ˌ ɡ l ɪ f s / HY -roh-glifs ) were

8424-469: The letter is conventionally represented with the Hebrew א in typography for convenience, but the actual graphic form varied significantly over the long history and wide geographic extent of the language. Maraqten identifies three different aleph traditions in East Arabian coins: a lapidary Aramaic form that realizes it as a combination of a V-shape and a straight stroke attached to the apex, much like

8532-560: The letter is used initially and medially in the Uyghur Arabic alphabet and the Arabic-based Kyrgyz alphabet , representing the vowel / ɯ /: ( ىـ ـىـ ‎ ). As a vowel, the letter alif maqsurah can be a carrier with a hamza . The alif maqṣūrah with hamza is thus written as: As a numeral, alif stands for the number one. It may be modified as follows to represent other numbers. The Aramaic reflex of

8640-414: The letters' sounds. The Phoenician numeral system consisted of separate symbols for 1, 10, 20, and 100. The sign for 1 was a simple vertical stroke (𐤖). Other numerals up to 9 were formed by adding the appropriate number of such strokes, arranged in groups of three. The symbol for 10 was a horizontal line or tack ( 𐤗 ‎). The sign for 20 (𐤘) could come in different glyph variants, one of them being

8748-572: The lines are read with upper content having precedence over content below. The lines or columns, and the individual inscriptions within them, read from left to right in rare instances only and for particular reasons at that; ordinarily however, they read from right to left–the Egyptians' preferred direction of writing (although, for convenience, modern texts are often normalized into left-to-right order). The direction toward which asymmetrical hieroglyphs face indicate their proper reading order. For example, when human and animal hieroglyphs face or look toward

8856-499: The little vertical stroke will be explained further on under Logograms:  – the character sꜣ as used in the word sꜣw , "keep, watch" As in the Arabic script, not all vowels were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs; it is debatable whether vowels were written at all. Possibly, as with Arabic, the semivowels /w/ and /j/ (as in English W and Y) could double as the vowels /u/ and /i/ . In modern transcriptions, an e

8964-436: The manner of these signs, but the Egyptians never did so and never simplified their complex writing into a true alphabet. Each uniliteral glyph once had a unique reading, but several of these fell together as Old Egyptian developed into Middle Egyptian . For example, the folded-cloth glyph (𓋴) seems to have been originally an /s/ and the door-bolt glyph (𓊃) a /θ/ sound, but these both came to be pronounced /s/ , as

9072-536: The meaning: "retort [chemistry]" and "retort [rhetoric]" would thus be distinguished. Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet ) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region . In

9180-574: The name it does not correspond to an aleph in cognate Semitic words, where the single "reed" hieroglyph is found instead. The phoneme is commonly transliterated by a symbol composed of two half-rings, in Unicode (as of version 5.1, in the Latin Extended-D range) encoded at U+A722 Ꜣ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF and U+A723 ꜣ LATIN SMALL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF . A fallback representation

9288-563: The notable exception of hangul . It is certain that the Aramaic-derived Kharosthi script was present in northern India by the 4th century BC, so that the Aramaic model of alphabetic writing would have been known in the region, but the link from Kharosthi to the slightly younger Brahmi is tenuous. Bühler's suggestion is still entertained in mainstream scholarship, but it has never been proven conclusively, and no definitive scholarly consensus exists. The Greek alphabet

9396-480: The oneness of God. The letter can be seen as being composed of an upper yud , a lower yud, and a vav leaning on a diagonal. The upper yud represents the hidden and ineffable aspects of God while the lower yud represents God's revelation and presence in the world. The vav ("hook") connects the two realms. Judaism relates aleph to the element of air, and the Scintillating Intelligence (#11) of

9504-409: The onset of a vowel at the glottis . In Semitic languages, this functions as a prosthetic weak consonant, allowing roots with only two true consonants to be conjugated in the manner of a standard three consonant Semitic root. In most Hebrew dialects as well as Syriac, the aleph is an absence of a true consonant, a glottal stop ( [ ʔ ] ), the sound found in the catch in uh - oh . In Arabic,

9612-448: The order of signs if this would result in a more aesthetically pleasing appearance (good scribes attended to the artistic, and even religious, aspects of the hieroglyphs, and would not simply view them as a communication tool). Various examples of the use of phonetic complements can be seen below: Notably, phonetic complements were also used to allow the reader to differentiate between signs that are homophones , or which do not always have

9720-701: The path between Kether and Chokmah in the Tree of the Sephiroth . In Yiddish , aleph is used for several orthographic purposes in native words, usually with different diacritical marks borrowed from Hebrew niqqud : Loanwords from Hebrew or Aramaic in Yiddish are spelled as they are in their language of origin. [REDACTED] In the Syriac alphabet , the first letter is ܐ , Classical Syriac : ܐܵܠܲܦ , alap (in eastern dialects) or olaph (in western dialects). It

9828-408: The problem. Hamza is not considered a full letter in Arabic orthography: in most cases, it appears on a carrier, either a wāw ( ؤ ), a dotless yā’ ( ئ ), or an alif. The choice of carrier depends on complicated orthographic rules. Alif إ أ is generally the carrier if the only adjacent vowel is fatḥah . It is the only possible carrier if hamza is the first phoneme of

9936-475: The rise of Syro-Hittite states in the 13th and 12th centuries BC. The Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the "Proto-Canaanite" script of the Bronze Age collapse period. The inscriptions found on the Phoenician arrowheads at al-Khader near Bethlehem and dated c.  1100 BC offered the epigraphists the "missing link" between the two. The Ahiram epitaph , whose dating

10044-510: The same root ʔ-L-P (alef-lamed-peh) gives me’ulaf , the passive participle of the verb le’alef , meaning 'trained' (when referring to pets) or 'tamed' (when referring to wild animals). The Egyptian " vulture " hieroglyph ( Gardiner G1 ), by convention pronounced [a] ) is also referred to as aleph , on grounds that it has traditionally been taken to represent a glottal stop ( [ʔ] ), although some recent suggestions tend towards an alveolar approximant ( [ ɹ ] ) sound instead. Despite

10152-401: The same sounds, in order to guide the reader. For example, the word nfr , "beautiful, good, perfect", was written with a unique triliteral that was read as nfr : However, it is considerably more common to add to that triliteral, the uniliterals for f and r . The word can thus be written as nfr+f+r , but one still reads it as merely nfr . The two alphabetic characters are adding clarity to

10260-480: The same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word. Visually, hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative: they represent real or abstract elements, sometimes stylized and simplified, but all generally perfectly recognizable in form. However, the same sign can, according to context, be interpreted in diverse ways: as a phonogram ( phonetic reading), as a logogram , or as an ideogram ( semagram ; " determinative ") ( semantic reading). The determinative

10368-513: The second half of the 4th millennium BC, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called " Scorpion I " ( Naqada IIIA period, c.  33rd century BC ) recovered at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa'ab ) in 1998 or the Narmer Palette ( c.  31st century BC ). The first full sentence written in mature hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab, which dates from

10476-531: The second letter of the alphabet , bet .) In the story, aleph is rewarded by being allowed to start the Ten Commandments . (In Hebrew , the first word is anoki ( אָנֹכִי ‎), which starts with an aleph.) In the Sefer Yetzirah , the letter aleph is king over breath, formed air in the universe, temperate in the year, and the chest in the soul. Aleph is also the first letter of

10584-423: The semantic connection is indirect ( metonymic or metaphoric ): Determinatives or semagrams (semantic symbols specifying meaning) are placed at the end of a word. These mute characters serve to clarify what the word is about, as homophonic glyphs are common. If a similar procedure existed in English, words with the same spelling would be followed by an indicator that would not be read, but which would fine-tune

10692-485: The spelling of the preceding triliteral hieroglyph. Redundant characters accompanying biliteral or triliteral signs are called phonetic complements (or complementaries). They can be placed in front of the sign (rarely), after the sign (as a general rule), or even framing it (appearing both before and after). Ancient Egyptian scribes consistently avoided leaving large areas of blank space in their writing and might add additional phonetic complements or sometimes even invert

10800-551: The time. Those additional letters are based on the Demotic script . The Cyrillic script was derived from the late (medieval) Greek alphabet. Some Cyrillic letters (generally for sounds not in medieval Greek) are based on Glagolitic forms. These were an indigenous set of genetically related semisyllabaries , which suited the phonological characteristics of the Tartessian , Iberian and Celtiberian languages. They were deciphered in 1922 by Manuel Gómez-Moreno but their content

10908-577: The two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform. The theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single individual conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian. It was eventually discovered that the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet was inspired by the model of hieroglyphs. The chart shows the graphical evolution of Phoenician letter forms into other alphabets. The sound values also changed significantly, both at

11016-477: The value of the now-leading vowel. For example, ʾāleph , which designated a glottal stop in Phoenician, was repurposed to represent the vowel /a/ ; he became /e/ , ḥet became /eː/ (a long vowel), ʿayin became /o/ (because the pharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants wau and yod became the corresponding high vowels, /u/ and /i/ . (Some dialects of Greek, which did possess /h/ and /w/ , continued to use

11124-399: The word: sꜣ , "son"; or when complemented by other signs detailed below sꜣ , "keep, watch"; and sꜣṯ.w , "hard ground". For example:  – the characters sꜣ ;  – the same character used only in order to signify, according to the context, "pintail duck" or, with the appropriate determinative, "son", two words having the same or similar consonants; the meaning of

11232-466: Was based on an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an Egyptian word; this word was translated into Phoenician (or a closely related Semitic language), then the initial sound of the translated word became the letter's Phoenician value. For example, the second letter of the Phoenician alphabet was based on the Egyptian hieroglyph for "house" (a sketch of a house); the Semitic word for 'house' was bet ; hence

11340-446: Was its phonetic nature, in which one sound was represented by one symbol , which meant only a few dozen symbols to learn. The other scripts of the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs , employed many complex characters and required long professional training to achieve proficiency; which had restricted literacy to a small elite. Another reason for its success was the maritime trading culture of Phoenician merchants, which spread

11448-431: Was not read as a phonetic constituent, but facilitated understanding by differentiating the word from its homophones. Most non- determinative hieroglyphic signs are phonograms , whose meaning is determined by pronunciation, independent of visual characteristics. This follows the rebus principle where, for example, the picture of an eye could stand not only for the English word eye , but also for its phonetic equivalent,

11556-421: Was suddenly available. In the early 19th century, scholars such as Silvestre de Sacy , Johan David Åkerblad , and Thomas Young studied the inscriptions on the stone, and were able to make some headway. Finally, Jean-François Champollion made the complete decipherment by the 1820s. In his Lettre à M. Dacier (1822), he wrote: It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in

11664-575: Was used to write the Punic language . Its direct descendant scripts include the Aramaic and Samaritan alphabets, several Alphabets of Asia Minor , and the Archaic Greek alphabets . The Phoenician alphabet proper uses 22 consonant letters—as an abjad used to write a Semitic language, the vowel sounds were left implicit—though late varieties sometimes used matres lectionis to denote some vowels . As its letters were originally incised using

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