"All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit O' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other."
George Eliot, author
In 1999, Yale Egyptologist John Darnell revealed to the world that the 4,000-year-old graffiti he had discovered at Wadi el Hoi in Egypt's western desert represented humankind's oldest phonetic alphabet. Incorporating elements of earlier hieroglyphs and later Semitic letters, Darnell's discovery contradicted the long-held belief that alphabetic writing originated in the area of Canaan (modern-day Israel and the West Bank) midway through the second millennium B.C.E.
Nevertheless, the writings—carved into soft limestone cliff—are thought to be the work of Canaanites, or rather Semitic-speaking mercenaries serving in the Egyptian army during the early Middle Kingdom (c, 2050 B.C.E.-c. 1780 B.C.E). Presumably developed as a simplified version of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the alphabet enabled those soldiers—as well as ordinary people in general—to record their thoughts and to read those of others. Many of the words are thought to be the names of people—the desire to record them stemming from the belief that your afterlife would improve if people read out your name after your death.
Today the impact of the first phonetic writing system is still felt all over the world, since all subsequent alphabets (with the exception of the Korean Hangul) have either directly, or indirectly, descended from it.
