Section 01
The Alphabet
Signs stop meaning things and start meaning sounds.
01Signs stop meaning things and start meaning sounds. Four entries: the tablet that fixes the order, the scratched signs that start the idea, the coffin whose letters travelled west, and the year the script was read.
Entries in this section
4 entries- 01.1The Ras Shamra abecedary
A clay tablet from Ugarit carrying the letters in order — the oldest known alphabet sequence, and the reason we know the order is that old.
- 01.2Proto-Sinaitic
Scratched signs at Serabit el-Khadim take Egyptian pictures and use them for sounds, which is the whole idea in embryo.
- 01.3The Ahiram sarcophagus
The Byblos inscription whose Phoenician letters are recognisable ancestors of Greek and Latin ones, and the argument about its date.
- 01.4Decipherment
Hans Bauer, Édouard Dhorme and Charles Virolleaud worked out Ugaritic cuneiform within about a year of its discovery.
Located, then read
Every entry in this section names a place you can put a pin in. Coordinates come from the register; the entries carry the argument.