Biblical Hebrew Blog by ClassicalHebrew.com

From the dawn of human culture, people had the need to mark property and correspond. The first method of doing so was by symbols-pictures representing different people and ideas. It was from this primary form of corresponding ideas by drawings that all the known forms of writing later developed, initially for administrative needs.

The three known scripts considered most ancient are the Acadian (Cuneiform), the Egyptian (Hieroglyphic) and the Indian (Sanskrit) scripts, all emerging towards the end of the fourth millennium BCE. Of these, the two relevant for our discussion are the Cuneiform and the Hieroglyphic, both emerging in two of the most powerful cultures surrounding Ancient Israel. These scripts are very complex because each syllable is represented in a different way, so that, for example, “ab” and “ba” would have two completely different ways of writing, not necessarily connected to one another. While the Hieroglyphic writing is pictographic, with actual pictures of animals and objects representing each syllable, the Cuneiform writing is more abstract.

Like the oldest known scripts in the world, the first alphabetic system of writing also initiated in the Ancient Near East, sometime in the middle of the second millennium BCE. This was the “proto-Canaanite” (Canaan being the ancient name for Palestine) writing, not documented in its primary stages but defined as such based on Phoenician and other Semitic early writings. While it developed from pictographic writing – a picture for each word, such as a picture for a bull, “‘Alp” – the abstract characters which evolved from the pictures came to represent consonants – “A” written with an “Aleph” – and not whole syllables, thus substantially reducing the number of symbols needed. It was the Phoenicians, traders who sailed across the ancient world, who spread the knowledge of this method of writing, which reached the Greeks. While the Phoenicians wrote from right to left, the Greeks wrote in the opposite direction, and reversed the letters. The Latin script known to us today evolved from the Greek script, while the Ancient Hebrew script evolved directly from the Phoenician, and is therefore written from right to left.

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