This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox. “All the dust of the land became ...

For centuries, historians and linguists have highlighted a deceptively simple question, what is the oldest alphabet in the world? While early writing systems like cuneiform and hieroglyphs are far ...

First, the hard facts: The earliest evidence of what’s thought to be the world’s first alphabet is a group of 3,500-year-old inscriptions found in Egypt’s Sinai desert — a simplified form of ancient ...

The oldest recorded alphabet may be Hebrew. According to a controversial new study by archaeologist and ancient inscription specialist Douglas Petrovich, Israelites in Egypt took 22 ancient Egyptian ...

My handwriting’s always been bad, but these days it’s bordering on awful. Perhaps I’m channeling my inner Phoenician, for now my printed “A” could pass for a Canaanite “aleph” in the ancient ...

The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet in the wider sense of the term 'alphabet'. It was ...

On a regroupé les documents alphabétiques du IIe millénaire, datés selon des critères archéologiques et/ou paléographiques, et adopté une démarche régressive. On s'est aperçu que la forme des lettres ...