Alphabets

Alphabets

ALPHABETS. This article concerns lore, mystical beliefs, and magical practices involving the alphabet and its letters in the civilizations and religious traditions that use them. The term alphabet generally refers to those scripts derived from the original Phoenician aleph-bet that have roughly one sign and only one sign for every phoneme, or at least, as in Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic, every consonant phoneme. Logographic writing such as Chinese, and syllabaries such as the Maya "glyphs" (largely deciphered in recent decades), Japanese katakana and hiragana, Indian devanāgarī, and the Ethiopian "geʾez" are therefore excluded from the following discussions, even though the last two derive ultimately from the Phoenician script. However, Near Eastern precursors of the alphabet, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics and their offshoots, will be discussed.

Origin of Writing

The beginnings of writing can be traced back to the fourth millennium BCE and earlier in Mesopotamia and in Kurdistan, the Zagros Mountains, and the Iranian plateau to the east and north. Subsequently, the idea of writing (however different the forms it took in each area) spread eastward to the Indus Valley and China, and westward to Egypt, Anatolia, and Minoan Crete. Though the earliest uses of writing appear to have been economic—the recording of mundane trade transactions—it quickly became so central to civilized life that every aspect of human endeavor was written down, from the deeds of kings and priestly rituals to the most sacred myths of the people.

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