This sphinx with doodles on its back is way cooler than it looks. At 23.7 cm/9.3 inches, it’s not much larger than a paperweight. But it contains a key to understanding the invention of the alphabet, one of the most significant technologies humans ever developed.
Dating to about 1800 BCE at an Ancient Egyptian mine located at Serabit el-Khadim, the statuette preserves both hieroglyphs and corresponding symbols that comprised the earliest alphabet. “Beloved of Hathor, Mistress of Turquoise,” go the signs. And this goddess was important for the location: Serabit was the location of a lucrative turquoise mine during Ancient Egyptian times, and Hathor was the goddess of this precious mineral.
This alphabet was also employed on the walls of the mines, scrawled alongside the hieroglyphs, pictographs that inspired the invention. The creators of the alphabet would have taken a hieroglyphic image for a concept and sounded out the word: for instnace — “aleph” meant “ox”. Then, they used the image for the sound of the word. (This is the origin of our letter “A”.) They did this for about thirty sounds, and thereby created a way to record speech without needing to have a sign for every different concept. This was a revolution.
Super cool also, IMHO, is a theory advanced by the historical linguist and Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser, who thinks that the OG alphabet was invented by illiterate people — immigrant Semitic miners who had either been captured and forced to work in the mines or were there of their own accord. The alphabet they invented was picked up hundreds of years later by Phoenicians on the eastern Mediterranean, and from there passed on to the Greeks and eventually Romans, which of course is the alphabet of English and so many other modern written languages.
As the famed scientist Carl Sagan inscribed, “writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of different epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic”.
Sources: _Smithsonian Magazine_, “Who invented the alphabet?” Lydia Wilson, Jan 2021. Image British Museum. _Bibke History Daily_, “Goldwasser’s second rebuttal,” Aug 25, 2010, Orly Goldwasser. _World Archaeology_, “Serabit Sphinx,” May 24, 2019.
