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The Birthplace of the ABCs
Yale Egyptologists John and Debby Darnell wandered off the beaten path and discovered themselves on a highway to the origins of modern writing.
by Bruce Fellman
December 2000
Palm Pilots. Instant messaging. Wireless Internet access.
Almost daily, the news is filled with advances in communications technology. But however the written word travels—whether over the Internet, by fax, or even as old-fashioned ink on old-fashioned paper—the ability to communicate in writing goes back, literally, to an alphabet, those small groups of symbols that can be assembled into words.
Researchers have long believed that this fundamental element of communication was developed in about 1600 B.C. in the desert region of ancient Palestine, what is now Israel and Syria. But recent discoveries by John Darnell, a Yale professor of Egyptology, and his wife Debby, have suggested that the alphabet was in fact invented in a different place and at an earlier time. And like many such breakthroughs, the evidence was lying right under the researchers’ noses—or in this case, toes. After six years of study by the Darnells and their colleagues from the University of Southern California’s West Semitic Research Project, as well as from Harvard, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins, many experts are changing their minds about when and where alphabetic writing began. According to P. Kyle McCarter Jr., a professor of Near Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins, the findings “force us to reconsider a lot of questions having to do with the early history of the alphabet. Things I wrote only two years ago I now consider out of date.”
The process that led to this fundamental rewriting of a piece of ancient history began more than a decade ago. At the time, conventional archeological wisdom still insisted that ancient Egyptian civilization was concentrated almost entirely in the Nile valley. Scholars believed that the life of the land of the pharaohs depended upon the ebb and flow of the great river, which served as the central highway of the ancient civilization. Egyptologists concentrated their studies on the Nile, the pyramids, and on such places as the Valley of the Kings, the fabled site of the tombs holding the mummified remains of pharaohs and their possessions. The Egyptians of those days were thought to have stayed out of the surrounding desert. And many of them apparently did.
But a surprising number, according to the Darnells, did not. In 1988, John Darnell was working in Luxor, an ancient city on the Qena bend of the Nile and several hundred miles southeast of Cairo. He had been hired by the University of Chicago, where he had just completed his doctoral studies, to copy and translate the inscriptions on the area’s temples and tombs. On occasion, Darnell would scan the landscape past the lush fields that bordered the river. Gradually, he found himself captivated by the barely visible ruts etched into the surface of the forbidding region known as the High Desert plateau.
On a whim, Darnell, who had been joined in Luxor by his wife (now a research associate at Yale), one day decided to follow a track known as the Farshut Road. In the recent past the route had been used by donkey caravans, and given the prevailing archeological wisdom of the day, the pair didn’t expect to find much on their walk.
But after hiking for about an hour and a half, the couple paused to reconnoiter. “At the top of an escarpment,” recalls John Darnell, “we discovered that the road was literally carpeted with a deep layer of broken pottery that we could tell dated from the time of the pharaohs. We also found the remains of a sandstone column on which an inscription identified the location as the site of an ancient temple. It became instantly clear that people had been using this road for a very long time.”
There had to be other roads, the Darnells reasoned, and after several years of prospecting, the researchers inaugurated an ongoing project known as the Theban Desert Road Survey. Using satellite imagery, aerial photographs, modern maps, and references to desert routes found in overlooked documents, the Darnells and their colleagues—including several Yale student assistants—discovered dozens of such highways. By laboriously following these obscure tracks, the researchers uncovered unexpectedly rich sources of artifacts. And by analyzing such items as the stone foundations of former tent platforms, bits of egg shells, the contents of burial caves, and enormous amounts of pottery fragments, they demonstrated conclusively that the Nile was hardly the only route the Egyptians traveled in antiquity. “Contrary to what we once believed, these people were using a network of roads that crisscrossed the desert and provided economic and cultural links to various parts of Egypt and Africa,” says Darnell.
The desert road system and the debris—much of it ancient litter—had been there for thousands of years, but modern investigators had either missed it or failed to appreciate its significance. “People often see only what they’re looking for,” says Debby Darnell, “and in many cases, they probably walked right by, even on, this stuff, because they'd been told there was nothing of interest in the desert.”
The Darnells’ work shows that soldiers made considerable use of the roads, and by examining what infantrymen and generals alike left behind, the researchers have developed information on subjects ranging from the life of the ordinary conscript to Egyptian techniques of waging war. Two years ago, at a site called Tundaba, which is midway between the Nile and the Kharga oasis, the researchers found the remains of a military outpost that was in use between 1700 and 1600 B.C. Working at the site, Colleen Manassa '01 got an early taste of big-league archeology.
A Near Eastern languages and civilizations major from San Antonio, Manassa was charged with investigating the living conditions of the soldiers who had established the camp. “The temperature regularly hit 120 degrees, but as long as there was a breeze, it was surprisingly hospitable,” she says. “However, it got cold at night.”
The discovery of charcoal, one of the many items that must have been brought to the outpost over the roads, provided evidence of how the troops kept warm. Near the dry stone base of the tent platforms at Tundaba, the researchers found mounds of ostrich egg shells, providing clues to the soldiers’ diet.
According to Darnell, this site and others like it demonstrate that at various times in Egyptian history, there was a major military presence in the Western desert. Then, as now, the troops were not shy about recording evidence of their passages. However, the carvings they etched in the limestone were not simply of the timeless “Kilroy was here” variety.
Along the road at a spot called Gebel Tjauti, a ruler named Tjauti left a monument, the deciphered text of which describes his efforts to retain hold of the highways against his enemies in a part of Egypt known as Thebes. This struggle occurred about 4,000 years ago at a time when strong central rule had broken down.
The Darnells’ reading of the text suggests that the Thebans, in trying to defeat Tjauti, were using the roads in an end-around maneuver that avoided a direct confrontation with what might have been a numerically superior army. The Thebans attempted to win by attrition with a campaign of constant harassment. (The strategy was not all that different from what the ragtag American Colonial army often used against the British during the Revolution, notes Darnell. “We reinvented the same approach with a different technology.”)
There was plenty of non-military graffiti along these ancient roads as well. In addition to recording their names and titles, travelers wrote about their accomplishments and petitioned their deities for safe passage through the desert. “The inscriptions are placed where other people will definitely see them, and most have a votive quality to them,” says Darnell. “There are many devotional messages dedicated to Hathor, the goddess of the eye of the sun, and it’s clear that the roads often served as routes for religious pilgrims.”
It’s now also clear that travelers and traders alike had been using these routes since well before the time of the first pharaohs. On various limestone outcroppings and boulders along the roadsides, the Darnells have found carvings showing stylized views of animals, such as hippos, crocodiles, and giraffes.
Surprisingly, however, these do not appear to be paintings of the local wildlife. Although the desert had, on occasion, been a more environmentally hospitable place, the actual creatures carved into the rock were not found where they were depicted. Instead, says Debby Darnell, the animals might be read as metaphorical symbols—the precursors of hieroglyphics. “We believe what we’re seeing is evidence that these early, pre-dynastic people were already thinking like the later Egyptians,” she explains.
The appearance of various kinds of pottery along the roads shows that material goods and cultural influences were clearly flowing into and out of the area that would become Egypt, and at a place called the Wadi el-Hol, the “Gulch of Terror,” the Darnells discovered a burial cave that housed the remains of more than a dozen Tasians, a desert people who may have imported both their culture and genes into Egypt.
The Darnells’ unorthodox conviction that the Egyptians and their contemporaries traveled by any route other than the Nile River had been radical enough when they advanced it in the early 1990s. But at the Wadi el-Hol, which is roughly 300 miles south of Cairo on what appears to be an old pony express route, the researchers also happened upon a series of cliffs and rocks that challenged a far more powerful tenet of archeological orthodoxy.
Carved into soft limestone were scores of graffiti. Most of them were written in the formal pictographic script called hieroglyphics, or in its everyday cursive form, hieratic. The difference between this system and a modern alphabet is that in hieroglyphics, each word is represented by an image, whereas modern writing uses words assembled from standardized symbols, or letters. Most of what the Darnells found posed scant challenge to such skilled translators. But then they came upon an inscription they couldn’t crack.
What immediately intrigued the pair was the script’s resemblance to Proto-Sinaitic, the letter-forms that had long been thought to represent the first alphabet. Despite intensive scrutiny, the inscriptions still can’t be deciphered with certainty. But a subsequent discovery the Darnells made only last year gave them an important clue about why an alphabet would have been so useful an invention at that particular time. During a return trip to Wadi el-Hol, the researchers found an inscription from a somewhat earlier period that was written in hieratic and refers to “Bebi, the general of the Asiatics.”
About 4,000 years ago, Egypt underwent a lengthy period of internal insurrection. In the course of reunifying his fragmented realm, the reigning pharaoh attempted to pacify and employ roving bands of mercenaries who had come from outside Egypt to fight in the civil wars. The Egyptians were the quintessential bureaucrats, and under Bebi’s command, there must have been a small army of scribes in the military whose job it was to keep track of these “Asiatics.” There would also have been, says Darnell, a communications gap.
“There was no such thing as a POW camp in ancient Egypt,” he explains. “When you were captured, you were simply put to work doing your old job, but for the other side, and so these 'Asiatic' troops, who were probably already quite Egyptianized, had to find a way to talk to their new comrades.”
They also had to deal with civil servants, all of whom could read and write hieratic. And somewhere out there in the desert, suggests Darnell, inventive scribes, to enable the captured troops to record their names and other basic information, apparently came up with a kind of easy-to-learn Egyptian shorthand.
“It makes sense that the alphabet originated in Egypt, a place that was highly literate and had already developed a system of pictorial writing, rather than in the illiterate Sinai area,” says Darnell. In fact, given the timing, it now appears likely that the alphabet in fact did not originate in Palestine, but was imported to the area from Egypt, and took on such a vigorous life of its own that historians have been persuaded ever since that it was born there.
Perhaps appropriately, such dramatic findings did not come easily. The investigation of the area around Wadi el-Hol was not only time-consuming; it could also be dangerous. “At times,” says Debby Darnell, “we had to practice combat archeology. Excavating the Tasian caves, we were covered with bat guano, dust, and human remains, and we had to work fast, because we knew there were thieves in the area.”
To avoid them, she says, “We literally swept our footprints away from sites. The reality of it is that when we go in, the first thing we do is meticulously record, copy, and photograph everything, particularly the inscriptions. This may be the only way they survive.”
But to prevent the disappearance of the material they have come to study, the Darnells have also gotten a bit more physical. In a tale straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, they once caught thieves in the act and, enraged, chased them into the desert, disabled their truck, and pitched their crow bars and chisels off a cliff.
Staying ahead of the thieves, to stay nothing of dealing with the rigors of the desert environment, the vagaries of research support, and the pressures of separation—Debby spends much of the year working in Egypt, while John teaches at Yale—is often frustrating. But the work continues to have its compensations and challenges. The alphabetic inscriptions at the Wadi el-Hol site remain maddeningly undeciphered, there is an ongoing investigation of the Tasian material, and there are always new roads to follow. There is also, says Debby Darnell, a spiritual payoff.
“It’s an indescribable feeling to be out in the desert and realize that people were here so long ago,” she says. “The inscriptions were their way of ensuring that they'd be remembered, so every time we record one, we feel we’re preserving a memory.”  |
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