How One Worker in Ancient Egypt Invented the Alphabet

Think about this: every message you’ve ever texted, every email you’ve sent, every book you’ve read—all possible because of a nameless genius in Egypt nearly 4,000 years ago.
Before the alphabet, becoming a scribe meant memorizing hundreds of hieroglyphs or cuneiform wedges. Want to read or write? Dedicate your life to it. But sometime between 1850 and 1700 BCE, a Semitic-speaking worker in Egypt looked at those complex signs and thought, There must be a simpler way. The breakthrough? Realizing you need only a couple of dozen symbols, each standing for a single sound.
Take the Egyptian hieroglyph for a bull’s head, which Egyptians called kꜣ. In the worker’s language, a bull was ʾalpu, starting with an /ʾa/ sound. So that picture became a sound sign, 𐤀—our alef. They did the same with “house” (baytu → 𐤁), “water” (mayim → 𐤌), and so on, ending up with roughly thirty consonant symbols.
Phoenician merchants later trimmed the set to twenty-two letters and spread it across the Mediterranean on their trade routes. This Phoenician alphabet became the ancestor of nearly every major script in use today. Ancient Hebrew grew straight from those letters; Aramaic—another Phoenician offshoot—replaced the older angular Hebrew script after the Babylonian exile and, through Nabataean cursive, eventually evolved into Arabic.
When Greeks met the Phoenician system around 800 BCE, they supplied a second stroke of genius: five surplus Semitic consonant signs (𐤀 alef, 𐤄 he, 𐤉 yod, 𐤏 ʿayin, 𐤅 waw) were repurposed as the first true vowels, giving us Α, Ε, Ι, Ο, Υ. A couple of centuries later they added Ω for long /oː/. From Greek came Latin via the Etruscans, and Cyrillic via ninth-century missionaries. Meanwhile, the original Phoenician shapes carried on as Hebrew and Arabic.
Practically every alphabet you see—from English to Russian, Hebrew to Arabic—traces its ancestry back to those twenty-two Phoenician letters (obvious exceptions like Korean Hangul were invented independently). So the next time you type on your phone or read a street sign—whether in Tel Aviv or Toronto—remember you’re linked by an unbroken 4,000-year chain to that anonymous quarry-side innovator who proved you don’t need elaborate pictures to write, just simple symbols for sounds.