Origin of the Alphabet

I've always been interested in languages and alphabets. Years ago I had come across the paleo-Hebrew script, and the ideas that the script itself was inspired by some form of pictographs. So the letter aleph was a picture of an ox head, daleth was a door, etc.

I'm not certain the validity of all that, but it does seem interesting nonetheless. And so it goes that the Semitic script that the Hebrews used, and maybe some proto version of it, have been used by the Greeks and eventually the Romans.

I like this short summary, found in Wheelock's Latin, from the 2005 copyright:

Today we are in the habit of distinguishing the Roman alphabet and the Greek, but the fact is that the Romans learned to write from the Etruscans, who in turn had learned to write from Greek colonists who had settled in the vicinity of Naples during the 8th century B.C. Actually, there, the Roman alphabet is simply one form of the Greek alphabet. But the Greeks were themselves debtors of this matter, for, at an early but still undetermined date, they had received their alphabet from a Semitic source, the Phoenicians. And finally the early Semites appear to have been inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs.

I suspect that we'll continually be surprised by what the reality really is. It is interesting to note that none of these writing systems seem to have any relation to cuneiform, or do they? Why is that? Could it be that the ancients themselves, although closer in time to the Sumerians and cuneiform writing, had already completely lost the knowledge of that writing system?

I also find this interesting that this language transmission may have taken place around the same time as the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament. The Hebrews had already gone through their exodus from Egypt, and all the desert scenes had already played out. They were in Jerusalem. There was a temple. And then the word of the Lord comes to Isaiah. Yet all the "classics" from history still haven't happened yet. This would therefore make the Old Testament a much stronger case for a "classic" than anything which came after.

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