The Alphabet

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?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

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

Related episodes

• Episode 1
  
  2 Jan, 2012 410 Linguistics
• The Rosetta Stone
  
  11 Feb, 2021 930 History of the Ancient World
• Literature
  
  5 Jan, 2012 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Language and the Mind
  
  11 Feb, 1999 400 Language
• Episode 3
  
  4 Jan, 2012 200 Religion
• Episode 2
  
  3 Jan, 2012 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Archaeology and Imperialism
  
  14 Apr, 2005 930 History of the Ancient World
• The Translation Movement
  
  2 Oct, 2008 500 Science
• Cave Art
  
  24 Sep, 2020 930 History of the Ancient World
• The Library of Alexandria
  
  12 Mar, 2009 020 Library and information sciences

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

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.