A to Z: The First Alphabet

It's our most important tool,

one we all take for granted:

Writing.

There are dozens of ways to do it

in hundreds of languages.

Symbols and alphabets to capture human thought and history.

Oh, wow!

With more in common than we think.

Egyptian and Chinese writing are very comparable.

When I started to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs,

I could feel that.

So many similarities.

And yet, writing hasn't always existed.

It had to be invented.

When you scrutinize what happened,

it is actually very dramatic, the giant leap for mankind.

What were the first records

to record human history?

Writing always starts with pictures.

It's drawn quite recognizably

as a pictographic sign.

So, anybody who saw that

in ancient Mesopotamia would say, "Ah, barley!"

The incredible story of writing

can finally be told.

You have in front of you

one of the first A of history,

followed by one of the first B's of the history, also.

Literally, alphabet.

Literally, alphabet.

"A to Z: The First Alphabet."

Right now, on "NOVA."

The Sinai Desert.

1,300 feet above the sand dunes

rises the plateau of Serabit El-Khadim.

And at the edge of the plateau

lie the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple.

This site may not be as famous as the pyramids,

but it holds far greater significance for our history.

4,000 years ago,

a group of migrant workers were led here

by a man riding on a donkey.

What they did in this place would transform

the most important technology human beings have ever invented,

one we all use every single day.

This technology allows us

to teleport our thoughts into another person's brain

across space and time.

It makes smartphones and computers possible,

and yet it is thousands of years old.

It is the ancient technology of writing,

and its story

is the story of civilization itself.

Egypt.

The Saqqara funerary complex near Cairo.

In 2300 BC, what today looks like a hill of sand

was the pyramid tomb of Pharaoh Teti.

Inside the tomb, Egyptologist Yasmin El Shazly

brings historian Lydia Wilson to see something extraordinary.

Oh, wow!

Yeah, they're pretty impressive, aren't they?

They really are.

Yeah.

The walls of Teti's tomb

are carved with thousands of stylized pictures.

But this is not decoration.

This is the earliest known complete text,

ancient Egyptian text.

Just beautiful.

These pictures are hieroglyphs,

a writing system older than the pyramids themselves.

And what do they say?

They are spells that help

resurrect the king in the afterlife.

The king's name is repeated

again and again in every incantation.

Rise up, oh, Teti.

Take your head, collect your bones.

Gather your limbs, shake the earth from your flesh.

Take your bread that rots not, your beer that sours not.

Stand at the gates that bar the common people.

Rise up, oh, Teti.

You shall not die.

Wow! Oh, there's so much writing.

Yes, these are all magic spells... Mm-hmm.

Designed to resurrect the king

The fact that his name is still there

made him, in a sense, immortal;

we're speaking about him right now.

And the ancient Egyptians realized that;

they realized that the written word had so much power,

and that by writing your name, you became immortal,

you immortalized yourself.

Hieroglyphs are indeed magic.

They may not raise the dead,

but like all writing, they allow them to speak.

Writing is one of the few things

that all societies do.

Everybody uses a pen, or a brush,

and with that, we can express all of our thoughts,

record all of our information,

study the stars and compose poems,

and write letters to each other.

So, writing binds humanity together

practically more than any other activity.

Today we take it for granted,

but writing is arguably the most powerful idea

we humans have ever come up with.

When you scrutinize what happened,

it is actually very dramatic

in one important sense,

what we like to call in our department

"the giant leap for mankind."

Writing always starts with pictures,

and then it becomes a little bit more complicated,

and that's how you develop into

a purely alphabetic system later on.

How did our ancestors conceive of writing?

How did they learn to make pictures speak,

and how did those pictures eventually become

the letters we use today?

The answers to those questions can only be found

in an archaeology of the human mind.

Writing is a recent innovation.

Our species has existed for about 300,000 years,

and for all but the last 5,000 of them,

people had to record and transmit vital knowledge

without the aid of writing.

Some cultures still do.

In the Northern Territory of Australia,

Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder of the Wardaman people,

is singing an ancient song about the creation of the world.

All these song line trails that were made,

happening all the way right back

from the beginning of everything,

to people, to people, to people,

all the way right back billion, billion years ago,

to million years, come down to hundred years,

and now, now come back to, right up to us.

And we know all the song now.

That is why we'll never throw that creation song away.

We still got it there today.

In a song line trail, there is the knowledge

that is given to you from the old people,

in what they call song line trails,

for naming all the different sites, the plants, trees,

mountains, water hole, and all of that.

Like a map, it is a map, in your mind.

It all links up.

Aboriginal culture has been handed down orally

through poetry and song for tens of thousands of years,

without the need to write anything down.

So, the first question about writing is,

why did our ancestors feel the need for it?

What prompted them to start recording things

not for the ear, but for the eye?

Images, of course, are part of all human cultures.

In the site now where we're sitting down,

it's called the moon dreaming site.

That's the moon that you can see there,

that's the half moon,

and the Aboriginal name is called Jabali,

and that's the headdress he used.

In the Wardaman Creation story,

all the plants and animals of the world were once people,

the Wardaman's ancestors,

wandering across a formless muddy land,

until the Creation dog let out a mighty howl.

When he sung out... like this,

the dog's the one that sound that made everything change.

He changed the whole world.

And this country now,

from the soft high mound become a rock,

and all these people become a tree,

and changed into all the different animals...

kangaroos, dingoes, whatever you can make it,

lizards and snakes, and all.

As the mud hardened,

some of the ancestors passed into the rock,

leaving traces of that moment of Creation.

That was the mud,

and people come along and put his foot there.

See?

And that's what it is there.

He was in the mud, now he's in the rock.

Human footprints, human there.

There is a dog there.

Then there is all human footprints, all over,

you can see it.

Then the shadow of the old moon,

who went into all of the rock, as well,

during the Creation time.

At the moon dreaming site,

Bill can sing to his ancestors.

For these are not representations of them,

these are the ancestors, gone into the rock.

But Bill sings from memory.

These images, powerful as they are,

cannot tell him which words to use.

For images to do that,