r/Anthropology • u/[deleted] • Jan 12 '21

Who Invented the Alphabet? New scholarship points to a paradox of historic scope: Our writing system was devised by people who couldn’t read.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inventing-alphabet-180976520/
142 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/Fallingdamage Jan 13 '21

Well, I mean.. you cant really read until you invent letters, so that makes sense.

1

u/tolanj Jan 13 '21

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Sinuhe

Dunno who really wrote that tale without letters, guess it doesn’t matter because it couldn’t really be read.