FROM SINAI TO BEIJING

The alphabet - it's a seemingly simple invention with a deeper history and longer journey than many people realize. The ancestor of most alphabets used today was invented in the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean coastal region), and the Penn Museum's new Eastern Mediterranean Gallery showcases this invention as one of the region's most influential legacies for the modern world. In the three stories that follow, we highlight little-known chapters of the alphabet's amazing history. In comparison with the earliest writing systems, Mesopotamia!! cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, whose signs convey multiple sounds or whole words and are read differently depending on context, an alphabet has far fewer signs and takes less time to learn. Instead of hundreds of signs, students of alphabetic writing only need to learn twenty to thirty letters to spell out the basic sounds of their spoken language.