1Of all the technologies discussed in this course, the alphabet may be the least celebrated and the most consequential.
2Earlier scripts such as cuneiform and hieroglyphs demanded years of training and remained the property of professional scribes.
3The first alphabet, by contrast, reduced writing to roughly two dozen signs that a merchant could learn in weeks.
4Its inventors were not priests or scholars, but Semitic workers in Egypt who adapted hieroglyphic signs to their own tongue.
5They kept the picture but discarded its original meaning, using each sign for the initial sound of the word it depicted.
6This principle, called the acrophonic principle, severed the ancient link between a sign and the thing it represented.
7Contrary to the tidy story told in older textbooks, the alphabet did not spread because it was obviously superior.
8It spread because it was cheap, portable, and just adequate for recording debts, ownership marks, and short messages.
9The Phoenicians carried it across the Mediterranean; the Greeks then added vowels, which earlier alphabets had conspicuously lacked.
10Scholars once dated this Greek innovation to the ninth century, though epigraphic evidence has repeatedly pushed the date earlier.
11What I want to emphasize is that literacy, once democratized, transformed memory, law, and literature in ways scribes never anticipated.
12Next week we will ask whether digital communication is quietly reversing that revolution or merely accelerating it further.