Reflections on the strange origin of the alphabet

[Midas]

One of the strangest things about the origin of the alphabet is how mysterious it is. The common story is that it was invented by levtantine slaves working in the sinai penisula under eygptian control and that they adapted it from eygptian herioglyphics. But if you take a step back and thing about that for a second and really take that idea in. What they're essentially saying is that a bunch of likely illiterate mining slaves invented the alphabet which when you think about it sounds like nonsense.

Another extremely big hole in this idea is that the oldest inscriptions are the wadi hol inscriptions in eygpt which are from 1900 b.c a full 400-500 years before the Sinai inscriptions. Of course academics know about the wadi hol inscriptions but the Sinai origin is still the common consensus. What's even stranger is that it takes 1000 years before this lanaguge is used to write down lanaguges like Phoenician or Hebrew even though it was supposedly invented by the ancestors of these guys.

Even stranger is the fact that the northwest semetic lanaguges like phonecian/hebrew/amorite. Were essentially dialects of the same language before 1000 b.c amd were mutually intelligible. The next question you might be asking yourself is did these northwest semetic speakers ever write their language? Yes they did we even have examples of this in ugartic which was the northwest semetic lanaguge that was used to write down the ugartici texts which share that common biblical mesmotpoian mythology

But it gets weirder because we even have this northwest semetic lanaguge being written down in 1800 b.c in cuneiform

 

[Midas]

Tdlr : northwest semetic or "super early canaanite" essentially had a well established tradition of being written down in the cuneiform script and from the ugraitic texts we see it already had an established literature. So it seems very illogical for them to randomly invent another alphabet which they didnt use for 1,000 years

 

[Midas]

If you look at where the oldest alpahebt inscriptions appear its in wadi hol which is located where?

And if you look up where this qena bend is ? You find that it seems to be coincidentally located on wadi hammat trade route.

 

[Midas]

So essentially in 2000-1800b.c at the same time these early cannanites/northwest speakers were adapting cuneiform to write their language.

Some other people coincidentally left an inscriptions on the same route used by these eastern cushtic/proto-somali merchants since 4000 b.c to trade with eygpt ?

 

[Midas]

I think the place we'll find the most evidence is in the arabian penisula. The ancient north arabian scripts is essentially a name for all inscriptions found outside yemen. And thamduic is the namel for all the undeciphered north arabian inscriptions. So if an arabian inscription is undeciphered its categorized as thamudic.

If you look at all the decipherd ancient north arabian scripts they are basically the inscriptions found in the oasis towns. What I suspect is that these oasis town north arabian scripts and the south arabian scripts are basically hybrid scripts that evolved quickly and diverged from the original script. You see this with how the nomadic north arabian scripts are essentially closer together since they diverged less. My guess is some of these nomadic thamduic scripts are essentially similar to the orginal script and might have even been written when the penisula was still inhabited by eastern cushtic/proto somali speakers.

 

[Midas]

By the way by most evidence I meant outside of somalia. There is very likley a lot more inscriptions and written evidence that'll be found in somalia than in the arabian penisula.

Why? Because in most of the Arabian peninsula there was no real writing material outside of rocks. Wheras in somalia we have wood as a possible writing material. You can just see this by the fact that somali nomads used wood to build our aqals where's arab nomads used tents made from camel hairs since wood wasn't a viable building material.