Our alphabet as the last form of hieroglyphs

Even if hieroglyphic signs cannot claim to be the first kinds of writing that ever existed, they can nonetheless claim to have been at the origin of many other systems, beginning with hieratic and continuing with demotic. But according to a theory that Winand considers, hieroglyphs have an indirect kinship with alphabetical systems, even if the two kinds of systems developed under paradigms that were completely different. “Inscriptions found in the Sinai Peninsula can be dated to the year 1800 BCE. The Egyptians were working mines in that area using foreign labour. For a reason we do not know, these people wanted to develop a simple form of writing. They appear to have altered the original meaning of hieroglyphic signs in order to assign them a phonetic value that belonged to their own language, which was of Semitic origin. For example, the sign that means “head”, which is /tep/ in Egyptian was set up to evoke for these Semites the word /resh/, which also means “head”. By a principle of acrophony, the Semites gave the sign for “head” the phonetic value of /r/, and then as a simplification this was taken to designate the capital letter Rho (written as P) in Greek”.

What follows can only be conjectured. Artisans and workers may have continued to develop the system, but there is no documentation for this. When the Egyptian and Babylonian empires collapsed in political terms, a space of liberty existed in the Middle East. New mercantile civilizations took an interest in adopting and developing this embryonic script. Over time, the Phoenician alphabet gradually emerged.

The rest is well-known. The Greeks borrowed that alphabet and modified it in accordance with the structure of their language. For example, developing the vowel system in a particular way. Later on, the Greek alphabet came into wider and wider use because it could be modified in accordance with the needs of new languages that needed to be transcribed. An early and important adaptation took place in Italy, where Etruscan writing was modified in the development of the writing of Latin. Much later, in the ninth century C.E., monks by the name of Cyril and Methodius modified the Greek alphabet so that they could write down Slavic languages (Cyrillic alphabet). Winand concludes in a half-humorous vein that “alphabetic systems are the final avatars of the hieroglyphic system”. (2)

(2) Jean Winand, « Les hiéroglyphes égyptiens » p.122