Small nitpick
> It took hold of human consciousness 3,000 years ago and changed it, with the written word representing thought itself.
Writing is at least about 5500 years old.
> It took hold of human consciousness 3,000 years ago and changed it, with the written word representing thought itself.
Writing is at least about 5500 years old.
Btw, I recommend anyone who hasn’t looked at it before to read up a bit on the history of writing. It shocked me a bit that writing has only been independently invented 4 times in known human history (Egypt, Middle East, China, Mesoamerica), with all other writing systems being either inspired or derived from nearby systems.
The English/Latin alphabet, for example, is a distant descendant of the Phoenician abjad, which itself was ultimately derived from Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Some traces are left today, like the letter “A” looking a bit like an up-side down bulls head with horns… because it actually descends from the hieroglyph for bull.
Interestingly, Arab, Hebrew, and Indic scripts are all derived from the same Phoenician ancestor, despite how different they all look today…
But I do recall enjoying diagrams such as this illustrating how different modern alphabets are related via historical counterparts (there are similar diagrams showing how Hebrew and Arabic emerges from Phoenician, as well as comparisons to runes): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script#/media/File%3A...
I also rather enjoyed reading about the history from Hieroglyphs, to Hieratic, to Phoenician (as well as Phoenician history in general). But unfortunately, don’t recall where. Start with Wikipedia :)
Same with Thai or... Mongolian - a not so distant cousin of Aramaic!
The fun thing about Mongolian is that to notice its similarity to Aramaic, you'll need to tilt your head by 90 degrees.
Compare this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script#/media/File:M...
With this: https://www.avesta.org/fonts/index.html
Now look at the first picture again and tilt your head.
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that, although I studied Middle Persian and Avestan (both of which rely on a variant of Aramaic), it took me almost 15 years to notice that. Now, it’s impossible to unsee.
In the middle east alone there are several ancestral writing systems that can't be traced to a single origin.
Note the focus on "independently" invented, and that I said "inspired or derived from nearby systems". There are many examples of writing systems that were made "from scratch" but only after contact with other civilizations that were already writing - e.g. the Korean Hangeul was designed from scratch, but only after millenia of Chinese literacy in Korea; and the Cherokee syllabary was designed from scratch, but only after centuries of contact with Western colonizers including access to their existing writing tools. If this is the kind of process you meant you meant with "multiple ancestral alphabets", I completely agree. But those were not "independent" inventions of "writing" as a concept. The idea of denoting ideas/sounds on paper is much harder to invent than the specific symbols mapped to each idea/sound.
My understanding is that the consensus in the literature is that all writing systems in the Middle East were either derived from an existing writing system, or created from scratch after prolonged contact with neighboring civilizations that could already write, where these historical lines can be drawn all the way back to Hieroglyphs and Cuneiform. I believe there is little evidence to suggest multiple inventions of writing as a concept by isolated groups in the region.
As for major writing systems that are still in use today across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia, there's even less variety: I believe most of them are ultimately descended from Phoenician.