If you look hard at the figure in the lower center of this carved standing stone, you can make out the faint outline of a figure riding an animal. It is a donkey, and this man was named Khebeded, and he is the leading contender for one of the most transformational inventions of all time: the alphabet.
The scholar Orly Goldswasser argues that Khebeded fit all the criteria for this accomplishment. He was likely a Canaanite, and was an overseer of miners working at a site called Serabit el-Khadim where the ancient Egyptians were mining turquoise. It was here and in similar places that evidence for the Proto-Sinaitic script first emerge.
This was during the 12th Egyptian Dynasty between 1990-1790 BCE, and the illiterate miners took Egyptian hieroglyphs and other symbolic pictures, and started recording the symbols to indicate the *sound* that that concept started with. In this way, under thirty markings could represent various consonants. This was vastly easier to learn than Egyptian hieroglyphs, since for those, one needed to know hundreds of images in order to understand a text.
There is no way of knowing whether Khebeded actually was the inventor of what eventually became the Phonecian alphabet (from which our Roman one derives), but it is certainly possible that this monumental invention was the doing of one relatively uneducated individual.
Thanks to my student Sarah Oiler for her work on this!
Sources: “Khebeded, the turquoise genius,” _Mèthod_, 22/7/2015, World of Science, Jordan Wagensberg
