Ten Dead Scripts - Free Preview

Turn a capital A upside down.

It's an ox head. Two horns and a face.

That isn't a coincidence or a fun theory. Three thousand years ago the Phoenicians called that letter aleph — their word for ox — because the shape started out as a drawing of one. Over centuries the drawing got simpler, then got flipped, and now it's the first letter you ever learned.

They did it with the whole alphabet. Beth was a house. Daleth was a door. Ayin was an eye, and it's still a circle. Mem was water, and the M kept the waves.

Aleph, beth. Alphabet. Every time you say that word you're saying the first two letters of a language nobody speaks anymore.

Here's the part I like. The Phoenicians weren't trying to invent anything that would last. They were traders who needed something faster than hieroglyphs — twenty-two signs instead of hundreds, learnable in a week, good enough to write a cargo list. Greek borrowed it. Latin borrowed it from Greek. Almost every alphabet on Earth is descended from a shipping shortcut.

The letters on this screen are worn-down pictures of oxen and houses and doors, and they've been passed hand to hand for three thousand years without anyone deciding to keep them.

I wrote a beginner's primer on Phoenician, along with nine other ancient scripts — two of which nobody alive can read.

Free preview if you want one.