The Alphabet

18 Dec, 2003 410 Linguistics

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the feat of astonishing intellectual engineering which provides us with millions of words in hundreds of languages. At the start of the twentieth century, in the depths of an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine on the Sinai peninsular, an archaeologist called Sir Flinders Petrie made an exciting discovery. Scratched onto rocks, pots and portable items, he found scribblings of a very unexpected but strangely familiar nature. He had expected to see the complex pictorial hieroglyphic script the Egyptian establishment had used for over 1000 years, but it seemed that at this very early period, 1700 BC, the mine workers and Semitic slaves had started using a new informal system of graffiti, one which was brilliantly simple, endlessly adaptable and perfectly portable: the Alphabet. This was probably the earliest example of an alphabetic script and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.Did the alphabet really spring into life almost fully formed? How did it manage to conquer three quarters of the globe? And despite its Cyrillic and Arabic variations and the myriad languages it has been used to write, why is there essentially only one alphabet anywhere in the world?

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Guests

  • Eleanor Robson 5 episodes
    Historian of Ancient Iraq and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
  • Alan Millard No other episodes
    Rankin Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages at the University of Liverpool
  • Rosalind Thomas No other episodes
    Professor of Greek History at Royal Holloway, University of London

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Programme ID: p0054950

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0054950

Auto-category: 410 (Linguistics)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. At the start of the 20th century, in the depths of an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine on the Sinai Peninsula, an archaeologist called Sir Flinders Petrie made an astonishing discovery.