All language subtitles for BBC.The.Secret.History.of.Writing - From Pictures to Words - מסמלים למילים - ההיסטוריה של המילה הכתובה

What if there was a technology
that allowed us to teleport

the contents of our minds
across time and space directly

into someone else's brain...

..that worked across huge distances,
that could send our thoughts

into the future,

yet was so simple a child
could use it?

Such a marvel, of course,
already exists.

It's not the internet or mobile
phones, but an ancient technology,

one that's at least
5,000 years old -

the technology of writing.

Writing is something that most of us
do every day

without stopping to think about it.

But if you do stop and think
about it, you realise

that what you are doing
is quite magical.

You are taking the thoughts
from inside your head and putting

them out into the world in a form
where another human mind

can understand them, even if
they are thousands of miles away -

or perhaps centuries in the future.

In this series, I want to explore
this transformative technology,

the different scripts that can turn
spoken language into visual form,

the varying methods we have used
to put words on a page and the way

that changing the way we write
has changed the course of history.

And the first question is
about the origin of writing.

Did it develop in different
times, in different places?

Or do all the scripts we see around
us share a single common root?

And, if that is the case,
then where and how did it all begin?

And who began it?

Egypt, the Saqqara funerary
complex near Cairo.

In 2300 BC, what today looks
like a hill of sand was the pyramid

tomb of Pharaoh Teti.

Inside the tomb, Egyptologist
Yasmin El Shazly took me

to see something extraordinary.

Oh, wow!

Yeah, they're pretty impressive,
aren't they?

They really are. Yeah.

The walls of Teti's tomb were carved

with thousands of stylised
pictures...

..but this was not decoration.

This is the earliest known
complete text,

ancient Egyptian text.

Just beautiful.

These pictures are hieroglyphs -
a writing system older

than the pyramids themselves.

And what do they say? They are
spells that help resurrect the King

in the afterlife.

If you know how to read them,

you can find the King's name
repeated again and again

in every incantation.

Oh! Oh! Rise up, O Teti!

Take your head,

collect your bones,
gather your limbs,

shake the earth from your flesh.

Take your bread that rots not,

your beer that sours not,

stand at the gates that bar
the common people.

Rise up, O Teti, you shall not die!

Wow! Oh, there's so much writing.
Yes.

These are all magic spells,
designed to resurrect the King

so he could live forever
in the afterlife.

The fact that his name
is still there

made him, in a sense, immortal.

We're speaking about him right
now, and the ancient Egyptians
realised that, they realised

that the written word
had so much power and that,

by writing your name,

you became immortal,
you immortalised yourself.

Hieroglyphs are indeed magic.

They may not raise the dead,
but, like all writing,

they allow them to speak.

Writing is one of the few
things that all societies do.

Everybody uses a pen or a brush

and, with that, we can express
all of our thoughts, record

all of our information,

study the stars and compose poems
and write letters to each other.

So writing binds humanity
together practically

more than any other activity.

Today, we take it for granted,

but the creation of writing
is the event which gave

humanity a history.

When you scrutinise what happened,
it is actually very dramatic

in one important sense -
what we like to call

in our department the giant
leap for mankind.

Writing always starts with pictures

and then it becomes a little bit
more complicated, and that's

how you develop into a purely
alphabetic system later on.

How did our ancestors conceive
of writing?

How did they learn to make
pictures speak?

And how did those pictures

eventually become the letters
we use today?

As I discovered, the answer
to those questions can only be found

in an archaeology
of the human mind.

Writing is a recent innovation.

Our species has existed
for about 300,000 years

and, for all but the last 5,000
of them, people had to record

and transmit vital knowledge
without the aid of writing.

Some cultures still do.

HE VOCALISES

In the Northern Territory
of Australia,

Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder
of the Wardaman people, is singing

an ancient song about the creation
of the world.

HE SINGS

All the songline trail
that they made it,

happening all the way right back
from beginning of everything,

to people to people to people
all the way,

billion years, to million years,

and come down and 100 years and now,

now come back to right up to us.

And we know all the song now.

That's why we're never sure
that creating song away,

we still got it here today.

What kind of knowledge is in those
songs?

In a songline trail,

the knowledge that is given you
from the old people,

you know what they call
songline trail,

naming all the different sights,

the plants, trees, mountain,
water hole, and all that.

And so it's like a map?

Like a map. It is a map,
in your mind, but all links up.

So break it here? Yeah, like this,

you've got to put your fingernail
on it. Yeah?

Meeting Bill,

I was impressed by the richness
and complexity of Aboriginal culture

handed down orally for probably
tens of thousands of years

without the need to write
anything down.

That's amazing!

And that raised a fundamental
question about writing.

Why did our ancestors
feel the need for it?

What prompted them to start
recording things,

not for the ear, but for the eye?

Images are important, indeed
sacred in Aboriginal culture

and, before I was allowed
to see them,

Bill needed to introduce me
to the ancestors.

HE VOCALISES

Thank you.

I said hi
to the spiritual people,

call out I brought this stranger
to welcome them.

I've got a young lady here,
told them it's a lady,

and he's happy.

Thank you.

This is Gandawag-ya, the Moon Rock.

As we talked, it quickly became
clear that Bill's way of thinking

about images was quite different
to mine.

While we're standing here now,

this one what I call
Moon dream inside.

And that's...that's half Moon.

Yeah. That's it in there.

Yeah. When he was a human,
he was called Yiwalyarri.

He's up in the sky. Yeah.

Now he's here, in the rock.
In the rock. Yeah.

In the Wardaman creation story,

all the plants and animals
of the world were once people,

the Wardamans' ancestors,

wandering across a formless,
muddy land

until the creation dog let
out a mighty howl.

When he's "hooo", like this,
the dog and the sound he made,

everything changed.

He changed our world.

And this country now,

where, from the soft mud,
man become a rock,

and all these people become a tree,
and changed all the different

animals, kangaroos, dingoes,

whatever you can make,
lizards, snakes and all.

As the mud hardened,
some of the ancestors passed

into the rock, leaving traces
of that moment of creation.

They were the mud, and people come
along and put their foot there.

See? And that's what it is there.

He was in the mud,
now he's in the rock.

The humans there,
there's a dog here.

All over, as I said.

And that shatter off to the Moon,

then one day all of the rock
as well,

during the creation.

When I see an image, I naturally
think of it as a representation,

a picture of something.

But, to Bill, these are not
pictures of the ancestors -

these ARE the ancestors
gone into the rock.

Bill's song about the ancestors
is also addressed to them...

..but he has to rely on memory.

These images,
powerful as they are,

cannot tell him which words to use.

In order for images to do that,

they would have to gain a new power
-

the power of representation.

And write a big songline
from west to east.

Cairo's Egyptian museum is crammed
with thousands of objects excavated

from the tombs of ancient Egypt.

One of the very oldest was
discovered by Gunter Dreyer

in the 1990s, at a dig in the city
of Abydos.

It's a clay vase, which predates
the first pharaoh by many centuries.

It was made 5,700 years ago

and it seems to use imagery
in a new way.

Gunter believes that the vase
is decorated

with a stylised representation

of the distinctive geography
of the Nile Valley.

Egyptians have always lived
on the land immediately adjacent

to the Nile, where irrigation
ditches can bring river water

to the fields.

Ancient Egyptian life was largely
confined

to this narrow strip of green.

The desert highlands on either side
was where the dead were buried.

So these lines represent something,
something that is not present.

It's a conceptual revolution
in the meaning of a picture.

And if a picture can represent
a thing, it can represent a word.

But what was it that made people
want to represent words

in visual form?

5,000 years ago, Egypt lay at one
end of a zone of cultivation

called the Fertile Crescent.

At the other end lay Mesopotamia,
modern day Iraq.

In both places, people had learned
how to irrigate the land

to increase food production,

that meant that not everyone
had to work the land

and a more complex society
could develop.

Irving Finkel from the British
Museum is an expert on Mesopotamia

and the region's first civilisation,
Sumer.

To set the scene,

it's important to understand
that, in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians

had what we call city-states,
independent walled entities

with a large population of farmers
all around, administrators,

a central temple and so forth.

And it is in those enclaves
of so-called civilisation

that the need was, I think,
first felt for some kind

of record keeping.

What we've got in front of us
is a very small handful of pieces

of clay with writing on called
cuneiform writing.

Yes. And we have in our department
a huge collection of 130,000 or so.

I thought, if they were all here,
you'd become giddy and dizzy

and perhaps even fall asleep.

Overwhelmed anyway. Exactly.

So we start with this.

So that's the oldest of these ones.

It is.

Do you have an approximate date?

It's probably about 2,900 BC,
something like that.

Wow, so 5,000 years old.
Something like that.

And the thing about it is you can
see it's a very orderly piece

of work because it's ruled
into columns and these round things

and half round things are numerals,

and at the back there's a big total,
where all the numbers are added up.

And this is a sign for barley,

which indicates that it's some
kind of...

You can see, that this is an ear of
barley,

in a pictographic kind of form.

Yes. And originally the writing
began in the pictographic form,

what we call pictographic form,
which means that people produce

the scribes, produce little
drawings of whatever

they were talking about, the animals
and plants and things like this.

So it's a very primitive level
of writing, but it's very ancient.

And it actually exemplifies probably
why writing came into existence

in the first place,
because it's a document

which is concerned with wages. Yes.

And people argue that this script
came out of the requirement

for complicated administration
of this kind

where written records
became necessary.

But anybody who works with
the Inland Revenue will be proud

to feel that that was
their striking contribution

to the progress of mankind.

So what I was holding in my hands
was the distant ancestor

of today's spreadsheet,

a grid of boxes with symbols
that represent numbers

and pictures that represent
commodities.

But the language of accountancy
is limited.

Eventually, the distinctive
wedge-shaped writing

called cuneiform
that developed in Mesopotamia

would be capable of representing

the full richness of Sumerian

and the other languages
of the region.

It would be used to write great
epics,

recount ghost stories
and tell jokes.

But as Irving explained, to make
pictographic signs speak in this way

would take another
great conceptual leap.

You could go quite a long way
with these simple signs,

but the giant leap came
when somebody conceived

of this matter, that you could draw
a picture

which represented something
that someone could recognise.

But, at the same time, that sign
could be used just for the sound

of the thing it looked like,

so that the sound became drawn out
of or separated from the picture.

So, on this tablet here,
there is an ear of barley.

Now the word for barley in Sumerian
is pronounced like "she".

So your Sumerian sees this and says,
"She, barley."

But, at the same time, this scribe
or a fellow scribe,

in writing a totally different kind
of document,

could use this sign not
to mean barley, but just to write

the sound of "she".

And this giant leap is something
rather simple, and it's something

which could have occurred
to a child, but, nevertheless,

it is of great lasting significance.

Using a picture to represent
a sound in this way is called

the rebus principle

and it makes it possible to spell
out words using pictures.

To give a really clear example,

there's a word "shega" in Sumerian,

which means beautiful or pretty or
nice or something like that

and so a scribe would write
it syllabically - "she-ga."

So he would use this sign, the
barley sign, for the "she" bit.

And then he'd have to write
"ga" for the second bit.

As it happens, "ga" means milk.

So he would draw the picture
which represented milk,

and barley and milk together would
spell shega,

which had nothing to do with either
barley or milk.

So this is a kind of rebus writing.

Rebus is a smart word for it,
it's really a pun in some sense.

It's a kind of pun

that you get another meeting
out of a sign.

At the other end of the Fertile
Crescent,

Egyptians, too, started to make
rebus puns.

Compelling evidence of this comes

from an extraordinary object
in Cairo's Egyptian Museum,

the Narmer Palette,
carved in 3,000 BC.

By conquering the Nile Delta,
Narmer took control of the river

all the way to the sea,
becoming the first pharaoh

of a unified Egyptian state.

The Palette tells the story
entirely through pictures.

But next to the main characters
in this grisly tale

are seemingly random pairs
of images,

such as a catfish and a chisel.

They only make sense in light of the
rebus principle.

The Egyptian word for catfish
is "nar", a chisel is "mer".

When combined, they sound out
Narmer,

the name of the first of
the pharaohs.

Next to his defeated enemy
is the symbol for a harpoon -

"war" in Egyptian.

Below it is a rectangle similar
to the ones on the Abydos vase.

The next step was to extend
the rebus principle,

which on the Palette is used
to spell names,

to the full vocabulary
of the Egyptian language.

The script the Egyptians created
in this way rivals cuneiform

for the prize of being the world's
first true

writing system, hieroglyphs.

Orly Goldwasser has made
them a lifetime study.

Hello. Lovely to see you.

How are you?

Great. When I'm here, it's great.

What have we got here then?

What do you think it is?

Well, it's certainly a text.

I don't know which way to read it.
How do you know it's a text?

It's all pictures. Stylised.

Yeah, what else? With repetitions.

Yeah.

There's obviously
a certain ordering.

The sizes. Oh, sizes
is very important.

You see everything is actually
on the same size -

people, birds, houses, snakes,
hands.

The hand of a person
and the whole person

is of the same size,

so this gives your mind
immediately an order.

The idea you are not in picture
reading,

but in script reading. Mm.

This is the greatest experiment
ever conducted to write language

in pictures only. Only pictures.

It's an enormous cognitive
effort to read it or to write it,

but it's fantastic.

What makes hieroglyphs so difficult
is that the scribes use thousands

of symbols and the rebus means
that most of them have

at least two quite
distinct meanings.

If we are talking about a duck,
as you see it here,

it can be a representation
of a duck

and this is fine. This is easy.

But in many other cases,
he is not a duck at all.

He's just the sound of the duck -
so.

For example, the word daughter
is sot,

or something like that.

We don't know exactly
how to pronounce it.

So, for the so, we have our duck.

And afterwards we put another
sign, something that looks like

a small half French bread.

You see it, cut French bread,
which gives the meaning - t.

So sot.

The rebus principle was the key that
unlocked writing

for the peoples
of the Fertile Crescent.

With pictures that spoke,
rulers could write

the history of their reigns,

draw up legal codes,

administer far flung empires

and build monuments
that still impress us today.

The rebus is among the most
consequential intellectual

innovations of all time.

So who discovered it?

True writing starts when the sounds
of a language are represented

and that, I think, was first
developed in Egypt.

And, of course, there's a bit
of a squabble between

Egyptologists and Assyriologists
about who invented writing

and, of course, we did -
important thing to clarify.

So, was the rebus born in Egypt,

or Mesopotamia,

or somewhere else entirely?

The National Library of China.

I came here to see examples
of another ancient script

used more than 3,000 years ago

at the court
of the Shang Emperors.

Wonderful. Thank you.

Oh, that's extraordinary.

It's such a complete example.

I was looking at the shoulder blade
of an ox -

dated around 1200 BC.

Incised on it are characters
in a clearly pictographic script.

This is an oracle bone

used in pyromancy,
or divination by fire.

Thousands of them
have been unearthed

and each is inscribed with one
or more questions.

And these could range enormously

from "Is the Emperor's toothache
due to an angry ancestor?"

to "Will it rain next week?"

or perhaps, "Is this a good day
to invade our neighbours?"

Once the question had been written
on the bone,

you turned it around and made
a small pit.

A hot poker was then inserted into
the pit and the bone would crack,

and the answer to your question lay
in the form of the crack.

And, in fact, this one has
been deciphered.

It's asking whether the emperor
should muster his army,

that much is clear,

but because we've lost the art of
this particular form of divination,

we don't know what the answer was.

The reason the inscriptions
are often readable

is that oracle bone script is
clearly the precursor

of modern Chinese writing.

In the Beijing Huijia
Private School,

Sophia is teaching her six-year-old
pupils to read and write.

Sophia's main task is to help her
pupils memorise

hundreds of Chinese characters.

To do so, she often starts
with the way a character was written

3,000 years ago on oracle bones,

where the pictographic nature of
Chinese writing is easier to see.

At root, like hieroglyphs,

Chinese characters are
stylised pictures,

but the similarities with Ancient
Egyptian writing do not end there.

Professor Yeung Shin Chen
is a philologist

who has studied
both writing systems.

Egyptian and the Chinese writing
are very comparable.

When I started to learn
Egyptian hieroglyphics,

I could feel that there
are so many similarities.

Firstly, the ancient people
think to use pictures,

but they found pictograms
are not enough

because there are many
abstract concepts

and abstract words in language.

If you want to record
the language fully

pictograms will never succeed,

so the...

Think of the method of rebus,
rebus principle.

The rebus principle is particularly
useful in Chinese

because the spoken language
has many homophones -

words that sound the same
but have different meanings.

For example, "mu" means "tree"

but it also means "to wash oneself"

and so the stylised picture of
a tree can represent the word tree,

and it can also be used
as a so-called phonogram

to represent the sound
"mu", to wash,

but that, of course,
could be confusing.

Sometimes we don't know

what the phonograms indicate -

the meaning or the sound...

..so they use a determinative.

A determinative is a symbol which
classifies words into categories

and so gives a clue as to the
correct way to read a character.

These three strokes indicate
that the character being written

has something to do with water.

They can be used to distinguish
mu - tree,

from mu - to wash,

and so clarify the ambiguity
inherent in rebus writing.

There are 214 classifier signs

and the majority of Chinese
characters are formed using one.

Egyptian scribes, too, divided words
into categories

and, as well as representing
words or sounds,

many hieroglyphs can also
be used as classifiers.

For example, you have a duck

after all the names of birds.

You can say "a falcon"
and then you will have a duck,

which means that the falcon belongs
to the category of birds.

The phonogram classifier combination
is a very good way

to represent a word.

Both Egyptian people
and Chinese people believed

that's like a perfect method.

Cuneiform - the writing system
of Mesopotamia -

also made use of classifiers...

..as did the last great
picture-based writing system

to be developed in the new world
around 600 BC.

Mayan glyphs also depend
on the rebus principle

to spell out sounds

and use classifiers to sort out
the consequent ambiguities.

The similarities are striking.

If you know a bit about cuneiform
and Mayan script

and Egyptian script and Chinese
script, for example, the main four,

you have an inescapable feeling that
even though they look

completely unrelated,

nevertheless they have many things
in common,

and this forces you to consider

the whole question
of origin and spread.

So could there be a common origin
of all writing,

a single time and place

where the secret of turning pictures
into words was first discovered?

The way I look at it is this - these
writing systems have in common

the rebus principle.

The rebus writing is
the written version

of the pun in speech

and everybody makes puns and puns
are a natural human form of humour,

and once you start with the idea
of reducing speech

to any kind of symbol from which
language can be retrieved,

then the rebus thing hits you
in the face

because when you're casting
around for the way to do it,

it's obvious. It's just obvious.

In other words, the similarities
between ancient writing systems

reflect not a common origin,

but what all people throughout
history have always had in common -

the human mind.

In other words, any load of human
beings, in any context,

who have to invent writing will come
up with rebus writings -

it's inevitable.

At the Medieval Round Church
in Cambridge,

I went to see an event organised
by my friend,

the calligraphic artist
Brody Neuenschwander.

He calls it A Brush With Silence

and it celebrates the diversity
of scripts in use around the world.

Brush With Silence
brings calligraphers

from about 20 different
cultures together.

They sit in silence and they write
their own scripts.

It is a meditation in ink.

But A Brush With Silence
presented me with a puzzle.

While the Japanese
and Chinese calligraphers

drew Chinese characters,

whose connection with the origin
of writing I could see,

at every other table,
the calligraphers were using scripts

which look very different.

Instead of thousands of pictograms,

they employ just a few dozen
simple shapes.

These are the world's alphabets.

At first glance, alphabets
don't seem to have anything to do

with the rebus principle,

so what was the connection
between the way writing began

and the way most people write today?

In search of an answer
to those questions,

I came to the Sinai Desert in Egypt

with archaeologist Pierre Tallet.

Pierre was returning to the plateau
of Serabit el-Khadim

in the company of old friends.

THEY EXCHANGE GREETINGS

With our guide Saleem,
we set out to climb 400 metres

to the plateau above.

We were following a path trod
4,000 years ago

by expeditions sent here
by the pharaohs of Egypt

to mine the gemstone turquoise.

This is the real entrance for
the place of Serabit el-Khadim.

You have the main access
to the plateau

and you can see,
on this big face of rock,

plenty of inscriptions and drawings
that have been left

by many people trying to commemorate
their venue in this place.

Arriving in here into the place,
yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And, for example, here
you have a very skilled inscription

with very nice hieroglyphs,

but, of course,
everybody was not able

to write his name.

And you have here other
means to commemorate

the arrival of somebody.

They could leave signs, very crude
signs, like this star,

that you can see here.

You even have an hashtag
on...a kind of hashtag, of course,

on the big rock that you have
behind us.

These people are trying to find
their own sign

to identify themselves.
Yeah, of course.

And you have, in fact,
literate and illiterate people

that are all involved
in the same operations.

And it's probably the combination
of those illiterate

and literate people that would
produce a new script.

We were also following
in the footsteps

of a famous husband and wife team
of archaeologists,

William and Hilda Flinders Petrie,

who first came here in 1905.

At the edge of the plateau,
the Petries came across the ruins

of an Ancient Egyptian temple

dominated by dozens of large stone
markers called stelae.

The stelae were covered
in hieroglyphs

that revealed to the Petries why
a temple had been built

in this remote spot so far
from the Nile Valley.

This one is one of the best stelae
that we have in this temple,

and it is the biography of an
official.

He complains at the beginning
because he is sent to Sinai

not in the good period,
because it's during the summer

and the weather was too hot,
but at the end it's a perfect story

because he is getting more turquoise
than everybody before him,

and everybody goes safe
and sound back to the Nile Valley.

So this is a common type
of monument?

Yes, we have several monuments
of that type.

So we have a huge amount of
information about individuals.

About individuals, and we have,
in fact,

one stele for every mission that was
made to Sinai.

The turquoise those missions
came here to find

was an important ingredient
in the magic

that raised a dead pharaoh
to eternal life.

And the temple, the Petries
learned, was dedicated to Hathor,

the goddess of turquoise,

so that the miners
could invoke her aid,

but it was in the mine
workings themselves

that the Petries made their most
surprising discovery.

Hilda stepped on a stone

and she picked up the stone
and told Petrie,

"There is something here."

And this stone in the mine

was the first inscription
in something very strange

that nobody saw ever before.

And Petrie looked on it,
and he said,

"This is not Egyptian.

"It looks like ugly,
very ugly hieroglyphics,

"but it's not Egyptian.

"There are too few signs here.

"This should be an alphabet."

And this was the boom.

If Petrie was right,
these would be by far

the oldest alphabetic inscriptions
ever found.

Could this be the first alphabet?

And if so, who was responsible
for it?

Pierre showed me a fascinating clue
among the stelae.

This individual clearly participated
in more than one expedition

because he's pictured on another
stela,

where the hieroglyphs give
us his name.

Retjenu was an Egyptian name
for the biblical land of Canaan

and Canaanite migrant workers may
have been a familiar sight in Egypt.

These wall paintings decorate a tomb
above the Nile in upper Egypt.

They date from the same period
as the stela at Serabit.

And one panel shows travellers,

in the distinctive patterned robes
of Canaan,

which contrast with the simple
white loincloths

of the Egyptians.

The hieroglyphic inscription
explains that 37 foreigners came

to make offerings
to the local ruler,

perhaps hoping to be given work.

Something similar happened
at Serabit, but, on the plateau,

the cultural exchange between
Canaanites and Egyptians seems

to have had momentous consequences.

It seemed that the inscriptions
in the mines were related

to the hieroglyphs
in the temple - but how?

Then another Egyptologist examined
an object that Petrie had brought

back from Serabit
to the British Museum.

Thank you, Mark. Really, thank you.

Last time that I saw him,
he was in a box. Yeah.

He moved now into a basket.
Into a basket, yeah.

For me, it's worth all the gold of
Egypt,

this little piece that stays
here, in the basket.

He has a small inscription
in Egyptian and a parallel

inscription in the strange
signs below.

So here you have an option
to break the code.

This is why I call him the
Rosetta Stone of the alphabet.

The code-breaker was
Sir Alan Gardiner.

Gardiner looks on it
and it's very easy for him to read

the Egyptian part.

It's a repetitive formula,

hundreds of times. It says, "The
beloved of the goddess Hathor."

And then he looks on the strange
signs below.

Gardiner guessed that they must
spell out a similar dedication

in the Canaanite language to a
Canaanite goddess.

A Canaanite wouldn't call
this goddess Hathor.

So he wants a name,
he wants the name of the goddess

because, if his theory is correct,
he has the beloved.

Beloved of whom?

On the other side of the sphinx
was what looked like a complete

inscription and Gardiner
was struck by the last symbol.

It looked like the letter T in the
ancient Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

and that reminded him of a Canaanite
goddess known from scripture.

In the Bible, we know the God Ba'al

and he had a consort.

The consort in Canaanite is

always with a T ending of the
female - and she is Ba'alat.

So Gardiner guessed that this was
what

the last four symbols spelled out.

The complete name of the Canaanite
goddess,

that he presumed should
play the role of Hathor, here,

Ba'alat.

The name of the goddess
was the key to understanding

the mysterious Serabit script.

The first letter, this rectangle,
was clearly based on the Egyptian

hieroglyph for house, Pr.

Egyptian scribes used this symbol in
three ways -

to write the word "house"
to represent the sound "Pr",

and, finally, as a classifier
attached to any word to do

with buildings in general.

But the Canaanites ignored
all these complexities.

The great trick, the genius trick,
was to take a picture,

to read it in its Canaanite name.

The house is "beit" in a Canaanite
dialect

and then you take only the first
sound, the "ba".

And whenever you will need the "ba",

you draw this house.

This is the familiar Rebus
principle,

but applied in a radically new way.

The characters do not stand
for the sound of the whole word,

but only for the sound
at the beginning of the word.

And this is the great invention.

This is the alphabet in around 30
pictures, 25 to 30 pictures.

You can write everything
because you are after single sounds

that you need, and to write
something in this Canaanite dialect

you needed around 30 sounds,
that's all.

And this was the huge...the
fantastic invention.

Here it is.

This is it. Yeah, this is it.

And maybe you have in front
of you one of the first As

of history, just followed by one
of the first Bs of history, also.

Literally alphabet.
Literally alphabet.

And it is working as an alphabet.

It is an alphabet.
They are using hieroglyphic signs,

but in a much simpler way.

The first B we have.

The first B from the whole history.

It was truly astonishing to see,
scratched nearly 4,000 years ago,

a symbol which is the origin
of a letter I use every single day.

The journey from the minds
of Serabit to the pages of my diary

began when Hebded and his
followers took their new script back

to Canaan, where it was adopted

by another Canaanite people -
the Phoenicians.

Traders and seafarers,

they spread the alphabet
across the Middle East

and the Mediterranean,
where it was taken up by Greeks

and then Romans.

We asked Orly Goldwasser to join
calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander

to explore the steps that gradually
transformed hieroglyphs at Serabit

into the letters we use today.

The Canaanites took
the hieroglyphs

that were meaningful for them

and then they saw the head
of the bull.

They could immediately relate to it

because this was the head of their
own God, Ba'al.

Ah-ha. OK.

But, in in their Semitic dialect,
the animal was called "aluf",

or "alph" or "aleph."

So they looked at this bull,
but they would say "aluf" instead

of the Egyptian word.

Yeah, they said it in their own
language. What did they care?

And then they decided this will
stand for "A".

So they would make it much
simpler than that, I suppose,

just in a couple of strokes of the
brush, really? Right.

Many hundreds of years later,
scribes in Phoenicia adopt this...

..this drawing of the bull.

They just turn it around because
they don't care about the image

and then the Romans just changed
the direction.

And you reach your A in English and
in Latin,

and what you have here is actually
the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph

of the bull sleeping forever
in the letter A,

because this is just the bull
turned on his horns.

Do you see?

Almost all the letters of the Latin
alphabet are ultimately derived

from the hieroglyphs that the
Canaanites of Serabit chose

to represent the sounds
of their tongue.

The broken rectangle that was
the Egyptian sign for "house"

was abbreviated by the Greeks...

..flipped by the Romans,
to create the Latin B.

The Egyptian hieroglyph for "water",

"mayim" in the Canaanite tongue...

..became the Greek Mu

and then the Latin M.

There were two Egyptian signs
which represented snakes.

These became the Greek Nu and our N.

So what was the Egyptian
word for head?

We don't know exactly,
but something like "teptup",

but it is of no interest
for the Canaanite.

What is their word for head?

Very different. "Rosh."
Rosh. With an R?

Yes, with an R at the beginning,
and here they will reach the R.

So this is the Canaanite...
This is the Canaanites. ..head.

Yeah.

Then the Greeks make a rather more

abstract representation of the head
here,

even though you can see
the general idea of head.

The Romans turned everything
the other way, systematically.

Everything is in the leading
direction.

But it's been centuries

and centuries since we've seen
any kind of image in this,

and I don't think anybody would know
that behind that letter is actually

a profile of a head. Yes.

Again, the Egyptian hieroglyph
is hiding in the R. Right.

They're always hiding.

But it's not just Latin and Greek
letters that derive from Serabit.

Almost all the world's alphabet
share this same root.

Scripts like Hebrew...

..Armenian...

..Cyrillic...

..Tibetan...

..Devanagari...

..Gujarati.

Sometimes the connection
is far from obvious,

but it's still there.

This document is a leaf from a

seventh century Koran dated
to 675 CE,

the first Islamic century.

It represents one of the earliest
examples of writing Arabic

in a calligraphic style.

But when I look at it, I see
in these archaic letter shapes

the echoes of the alphabet at
Serabit.

So, for example, if you see
this letter here,

it looks like a line with a small
tail,

this is the alif, the first
letter, the A.

It originally looked a little
like a bull, like this,

and it gets stylised in Phoenician,
simplified, simply this.

Now the connection between
that and our A in English

is quite obvious.

Now, one more step takes us
to Nabatiye and Aramaic.

Another simplification, it looks
simply like a six.

And then in the Koran fragment
that we looked at,

we can see that the loop has almost
completely disappeared and we simply

have this little tail.

And then the modern Arabic
script, a straight line.

So that straight line through these
stages goes all the way back

to that bull, even though
at different ends

they look nothing alike.

So the modern Arabic alphabet
and the Latin alphabet that we use

to write English are our cousins,

they belong to the same family.

All the alphabets of Arabia,
of the Mediterranean,

of the Middle East, all
of the alphabet scripts seem to go

back to one original prototype.

It seems that the alphabet,
the concept of writing each phoneme

with a separate glyph, that idea,
as simple as it is,

was only invented once.

What Hebded and his followers did
in the mines of Serabit

changed the world.

They were not scribes or scholars,
but, when they adapted the

rebus principle, which was the basis
of all ancient scripts, to make

the first letters, they created
a form of communication

which would eventually sweep
the globe.

We owe to those illiterate
migrant workers

the invention of the alphabet...

..a simple script which gave the
gift of writing

to countless cultures,
uniting the peoples of the world

across space and time.