Friends of ASOR present the first webinar in the 2023-2024 season on August 31 2023, at 3:00 pm EDT, featuring Prof. Seth Sanders moderated by Prof. Samuel Boyd.  Who really invented the alphabet? Despite its vast influence, we are still uncertain about precisely where the world’s most influential communication system came from. One reason for this uncertainty is that debate about the alphabet’s origins has tended to focus on questions for which there is no clear evidence–the personal identity, social status, and educational background of the inventor/s, on the one hand, and the exact date of its invention on the other. What we do know for sure about the early alphabet’s background is linguistic and material: it is widely agreed that it was created by speakers of West Semitic language ancestral to Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. And as you can see from the illustration, its letters were closely based on what Egyptian hieroglyphic signs looked like.

But there is another—basically unexplored—avenue that can reveal surprisingly precise information about what the early alphabet’s creators drew on and how they were trained. Because in fact there is ample evidence about what knowledge the earliest alphabetic writers did and did not draw on. First, if the alphabet’s inventors drew on what Egyptian signs looked like, did they know, or care, what they sounded like? That is, is there any evidence that they knew how the Egyptian writing system actually worked? Second is whether anyone was professionally trained in the early alphabet: was it systematized and taught carefully, the way a scribe would, or casually and unevenly transmitted, like a game or informal craft tradition?

This talk will present new evidence for a strictly visual, rather than Egyptian-scribal-based linguistic basis for the alphabet’s origins, and for its informal use by non-scribal—and perhaps also scribal–users during its first 500 years. This evidence for the success of a new sort of non-scribal writing system outside of bureaucratic centers has historical analogies in the spread and development of the Greek alphabet and can help us reflect on the role of play and craft traditions in the invention and spread of new cultural phenomena. The webinar will conclude with a live Q&A session moderated by Prof. Samuel Boyd of the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Seth L. Sanders is an expert in the languages and cultures of the ancient Levant, from Ugaritic and Amorite to Hebrew and Aramaic. He has edited or coedited studies of the cuneiform texts from Israel and Palestine, writing in the ancient Near East, and ancient Jewish sciences, as well as writing two books, The Invention of Hebrew and From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylon. His current work, which has been supported by the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation, is on a new approach to the composition of the Hebrew Bible, including the first open-access presentation of the sources of the Pentateuch beginning with the Priestly Work at pentateuch.digital. He is also interested in ancient and modern poetic and liturgical performance of religious texts from The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice to Black Sabbath. He currently teaches at UC Davis and will join Dalhousie University as McLeod Professor of Classics in Fall 2024.

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