About 2000 BC, the Egyptian pharaohs realized they had a problem. With each military victory over their neighbors, they captured and enslaved more prisoners of war. But the Egyptians could not pass down written orders to these slaves as they could not read hieroglyphics.
Early writing systems, such as Egyptian Hieroglyphics, were extremely cumbersome and difficult to learn. These systems had thousands of character, with each symbol representing an idea or word. Memorizing them could take years. Only a handful of Egyptians could actually read and write their complicated script.
Linguists believe that almost all modern alphabets are derived from the simplified version of hieroglyphics devised by the Egyptians four thousand years ago to communicate with their slaves. The development of an alphabet, the writing system used throughout the Western World, changed the way the ancients communicated.
In the simplified version, each character represented only a sound. This innovation cut back the number of characters from a few thousand to a few dozen, making it far easier to learn and use the characters. The complicated hieroglyphic language was eventually forgotten, and scholars were not able to translate the characters until the discovery of the “Rosetta Stone” in 1799.
The alphabet was extremely successful. When the Egyptian slaves eventually migrated back to their home countries, they took the writing system with them. The alphabet spread across the Near East, becoming the foundation for many writing systems in the area, including Hebrew and Arabic. The Phoenicians, an ancient civilization of seaborne traders, spread the alphabet to the tribes they encountered along the Mediterranean coast. The Greek and Roman alphabets, in turn were based on the ancient Phoenician script.Today most Western languages, including English, use the Roman alphabet.
ADDITIONAL FACTS- Several letters in modern-day English are direct desendents of Ancient Egyptian Characters. For instance, the letter “B” derives from the Egyptian character for the word “house”.
- The 2006 edition of the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY contains 171,476 words in correct usage, among the most of any language
