Origins of our Alphabet

A tour, starting with A - Alpha

A - ALPHA - ALEPH

A friend recently drew my attention to this playful carving on the Airavatesvara Temple in Kumbakonam, India. From the left side we see a bull, from the right side an elephant.

It immediately reminded me of a suggestion for the origin of the word ‘elephant’, which derives from the ancient Greek elephas, elephantos. Since elephants were not native to Greece or its Near Eastern neighbours, where did the Greeks get the word?

The proposed etymology is that it came from the Phoenician words aleph Hind, meaning ‘bull of India’. (The proposer of this derivation was the prolific German scholar August Pott; some scholars are sniffy about it, but it doesn’t strike me as totally potty…)

Aleph, which the Greeks heard as alpha, was the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, created some time in the 2nd millennium BC. The Phoenicians were residents of cities such as Sidon and Tyre on the Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip known as the Levant (today in the territories of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel):

From around 1000 BC to 800 BC the Phoenicians were the greatest sailors and traders in the Mediterranean and Aegean. They were also a conduit of goods and ideas from India and the Far East into Greece. Along with a host of objects and materials, their most transformative import into Greece was their alphabet, which began with the letters aleph bet. The Greeks took the Phoenician letter symbols and adapted them for their own purposes, creating their alphabet around 800 BC.

Alpha meant nothing other than a letter-name to the Greeks, but it did to the Phoenicians, who spoke a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic. Their letter names were based on everyday Phoenician words. Aleph was the word for ‘bull’ or ‘ox’, a word that was heard to start with the vowel sound ‘ah’. And excitingly, the letter shape itself represented – an ox! In fact, the head of an ox with its horns trailing behind:

The Phoenicians tended to draw this letter with the ‘nose’ of the ox pointing to the left, but the Greeks remodelled Phoenician letters on geometrical lines and turned the alpha round so that it stood upright on its horns. One can still imagine the ox head facing forward, horns trailing behind, as if the ploughman is guiding his plough up the page:

When the Greeks began to found settlements in Southern Italy during the 700s BC, they took their alphabet with them. It was borrowed by the local inhabitants of South Italy, the Etruscans. In turn the Romans later adopted the alphabet from their Etruscan neighbours, and created the Latin alphabet we still use today. Of course it still begins with an A.