[Early photograph (before 1896) of an ink-squeeze rubbing being taken of the 781 CE Syriac Christian stone inscription, Xi’an, China. The monument was thrown down and lost during a persecution of foreign religions in the 9th century, and then rediscovered in the 17th century]
20250219: candidate Blogpost_498 started. Jump from Annex P above.
Havelock, in the course of reference 2 is enthusiastic about the invention of the Greek alphabet, propelling, on his telling, a step change from an oral culture to a literate culture, with this last able to support a whole new level of intellectual activity. A step change in human consciousness. Another version of the roughly contemporary story at reference 3. Which propelled me to an investigation of the alphabet.
This led first to the helpful introduction from the Penn Museum at reference 4 – where I stumbled across the 3m limestone monument snapped above. A Semitic flavoured alphabet in northwestern China? A monument, sometimes called the Nestorian Stele, which gets a mention in the piece from Wikipedia about Xi’an at reference 1.
Which led in turn to the (preview of the) paper about the stele at reference 7, taking in the Wikipedia entry at reference 5 and the paper about the alphabet at reference 6 on the way. So apart from the singular rock, we now have a more nuanced story about the Greek alphabet.
Obvious enough when one is told, but the Greek alphabet did not spring, fully fledged, from the cauldron of creation. Rather, like most important or interesting things, it had long gestation, in this case now fairly well documented.
Starting with Egyptian hieroglyphs, through to the Phoenician alphabets, through various Greek alphabets, ending in Athens, following a vote taken shortly after the humiliating loss of the Peloponnesian War, with the one we know, the Ionian alphabet, around 400BC. With the war, according to Wikipedia, putting an end to the golden age of Greece, shiny new alphabet notwithstanding.
This Greek alphabet went on to dominate most of the Indo-European world, to which it had been adapted from its Semitic roots, very roughly speaking by the addition of vowels.
An alphabet which started out acrophonic, by which is meant that the name of the letter was a word which started with the letter in question – in the example above ‘head’. While the letter ‘B’ was named for ‘house’, that is to say ‘Beth’ as in Bethlehem. From where I associate to the NATO alphabet snapped above, which has reinstated this principle.
An alphabet which was phonetic in orientation, which meant that there was a reasonably clear connection between the way that a word was spelt and the way that it was spoken or sounded. This in contrast to Chinese where the character for a word might be the same all over China – but could be spoken quite differently, according to dialect – which varied all over China.
Purpose
Which brings me to the matter of what alphabets are for – this being something which emerges rather after the event, after alphabets have emerged, evolved and survived.
We want some way to make speech permanent, to be a store of information to which we can both read and write, to use the analogy of storage media in computers.
Speech has the important property of being linear, so what we want to do is to convert speech into a string of symbols which we can set down on stone, wood or paper and from which we can more or less recover the original speech. We understand that some aspects of speech – what we might call the interactive or interpersonal aspects of speech – are probably not going to be captured by this process. A lossy process in communications jargon, but not too lossy.
So we all need to agree on the set of symbols to be used for these purposes: they should be easy to set down and to read and there should not be too many of them. Say around twenty.
This last qualification rules out mapping speech onto words because there are lots of words and there would be too many symbols. It also turns out that there are too many syllables too. We need somehow to break speech down into something closer to the basic sounds. But not too close because that takes us to the phonetic alphabet which is, again, too long and too complicated for the man in the street.
The answer turned out to be to split the symbols of the early attempts at alphabets into consonants and vowels, giving a total of roughly 26, a split which suited Greek and the family of Indo -European languages of which it was part. Maybe did not suit the Semitic languages which came before quite so well.
There is a bit of compromise here in that we allow a certain amount of national variation at the margins and we allow foreigners to use accents on letters, if they must.
Noting that:
• In the beginning, users of alphabets did not bother with splitting speech into words or with punctuation. One just set down a continuous stream of letters. Experiment reveals that reading such stuff is not that difficult, although spaces between words, upper and lower case, punctuation and other marks are a great help, they are a good thing. The sample above was built in Word from a piece (reference 10) in the Financial Times – learning on the way that judicious use of white space to structure the text a bit is pretty helpful too
• Some people argue, particularly people from a pictogram culture like the Chinese, that there is too much loss involved here. Forcing words into an alphabetic straight jacket is unnatural. That is not how words are. They have a point – but we judge the gains to outweigh the losses.
• In Ruhlen’s 1988 classification of the world’s languages, on page 290 of reference 8, Indo-European has become Indo-Hittite and Semitic is one of the six top level groups within Afro-Asiatic. Fitting an Indo-European flavoured alphabet onto all these other groups might well be tricky.
Order
We want lots of people to be able to read and write and to that end, for teaching purposes, we need to give the letters of the alphabet names and to present alphabets in a standard order which can be easily memorised. To which end, it helps if the names of the letters are reasonably short and reasonably well separated, one from another. The people who invented the NATO names snapped above were very focussed on this last point, on the need not to mistake one letter for another, to get the call sign of the aeroplane in question right.
Here we are interested in the business of order – where the problem is that there is not a natural order. One can arrange letters in groups, perhaps in trees, but they do not fall in an obvious way into a linear, serial order. We cannot, for example, order letters by the position along the vocal tract where they are made; it just does not work. Although, in the case that some letters are used to denote numbers as well as sounds, one does have the natural order of the numbers.
The answer, according to the quite old reference 6, is that that order of our alphabet results from organising its letters into a rectangular array – from which I associated to the Periodic Table of the chemists – and read off the order of the letters from the columns, working from top to bottom and then left to right.
Where, in the beginning, it took a while for the details of this array to settle down.
Noting that order, as well as being a teaching aid, is what makes indexes and dictionaries possible. Devices which really came into their own with the invention of printing. But that is another story.
Rocks to the east
Back with the last part of reference 4, I read about how both Christians and Muslims were pushing east across Asia to China in the second half of the first millennium. On the Silk Road. Traders and mercenaries.
And some Nestorian Christians got a foothold in Xi’an, at that time the imperial capital., a foothold which survived for a few hundred years.
This included erecting the 3m limestone stele illustrated at the beginning of this post. The bulk of the stele is given over to rehearsing the main points of the Nestorian faith in Chinese, but the stele is also annotated, as it were, in Syriac. Syriac being in the Aramaic branch of the Semitic group of languages. One can read all about it at reference 9.
It does not seem that Chinese faith or their faith in pictograms was shaken by all this. They showed respect, but did not go further.
The stele was lost for more than five hundred years, only being recovered early in the 17th century, when it came to the attention of the Jesuits then resident in China – and went on to attract far more interest on the west than it did in the east. While the Jesuits might have been troubled by the incursion of this heresy – although they could hardly burn the stele at the stake, even in the unlikely event of the Chinese authorities having permitted such a thing.
All this is detailed at reference 7, of which the first part of the prologue is freely available, enough for present purposes.
Oddment
One of the later Jesuits was one Matteo Ricci and he was good at memory tricks, like reciting the order of a pack of cards that had been turned in front of him. As I recall from reference 12 (my copy of which has probably been culled), he does this by associating each card with a place on a journey with which he was familiar, or perhaps with a place in a room with which he was familiar. He travelled the route or room in his mind, picking up the cards as he went.
One needs to transfer the static task to the world of action and episodic memory?
A trick for which you do not need to be literate.
An episode in the history of human involvement with lists.
Conclusions
The invention of the Greek alphabet may not be quite the simple pivot which heaved the people of Europe from a state of oral consciousness to a state of literate consciousness which Havelock suggests in his book, perhaps his last book, at reference 2. Nevertheless, the argument that literacy drove a step change in the power of human thought and a corresponding step change in the nature, or at least the contents, of human consciousness, seems to be a strong one.
An argument that does not require everybody to be able to read and write, but enough people. Enough leaders who could exploit the new technology.
I should add that I am only part way through the book and it may well be that the story gets more nuanced as one goes through it.
[There is fierce debate over whether the towns and villages in the rural High Peaks district should secede from Derbyshire and throw their lot in with the growing city nearby © Alamy]
References
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an.
Reference 2: The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present – Eric A Havelock – 1986. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Reference 3: Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word – Walter J. Ong, S.J. – 1982.
Reference 4: The Alphabet: A Remarkable Journey from Sinai to Beijing – Virginia R. Herrmann, Adam Smith, Penn Museum – 2023. Expedition Magazine, Volume 64 No.3.
Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Greek_alphabet.
Reference 6: The Order of the Letters in the Greek Alphabet - John L. Myres – 1942. Available at JSTOR.
Reference 7: The story of a stele: China's Nestorian monument and its reception in the west, 1625-1916 - Michael Keevak – 2008. The first part of the prologue, enough for present purposes is available on the Internet.
Reference 8: A guide to the world's languages. Vol. 1: Classification – Merritt Ruhlen – 1987
Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriac_language.
Reference 10: Rural England considers redrawing the map: Greater Manchester could boost Derbyshire communities but historical attempts to alter local government administrations have been unpopular – Jennifer Williams, Financial Times – 2025.
Reference 11: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/02/surrey-affairs.html. Not just in Epsom that we worry about reorganisation if reference 10 is anything to go by.
Reference 12: The memory palace of Matteo Ricci – Jonathan D Spence – 1984. Available at the Internet Archive. The opening paragraph is snapped above.
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