It is 3,800 years ago. Mijnwerker laughfully hides himself in a temple and there learns strange signs there. How useful can that become new alphabet?
Wild centuries, the beginning. A new episode every Friday. More information: nrc.nl/wilde-euwen
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This literature was used for this episode, among other things:
Ludwig D. Morenz. ‘EL (god) axis “Father in Regalness”. Mine m in Serabit El Khadim As a Middle Bronze-Age (c. 1900 BC). Working Space Sacralized by Early Alefbetic Writing ‘ in Working Paper 13 Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, 2023.
Martijn Jaspers and Toon van Hal. ‘From house to hashtag, from oxhead to monkey tail. A history of the alphabet ‘,, ” Maklu Publisher, 2023.
Silvia Ferrara. ‘The Greatest Invention. A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts’, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2022 (translated from Italian by Todd Portnowitz).
Felix Höflmayer EA ‘Early Alphabetic Writing In The Ancient Near East: The’ Missing Link ‘From Tel Lachish’ in Antiquity, June 2021.
Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele (eds). ‘Understanding Relations between Scripts II Early Alphabets’, Oxbow Books, 2020.
Miriam Lichtheim. ‘Ancient Egyptian Literature ‘, University of California Press, 2019 (first edition 1975).
Aaron Koller. ‘The Diffusion of the Alphabet in the Second Millennium BCE: On the Movements of Scribal Ideas from Egypt to the Levant, Mesopotamia, And Yemen’in Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, in December 2018.
Steven R. Fischer. ‘History of Writing’, Reaction Books, 2003.
Brian E. Colles. ‘The Proto-Alphabetic Inscriptions of Canaan’ Ancient Near Eastern Studies, 1991.
Lina Eckenstein. ‘A History of Sinai ‘Macmillan 1921.
- Text and presentation:
- Hendrik Spiering
- Editorial and direction:
- Mirjam van Zuidam
- Music, assembly and mixage:
- Rufus van Baardwijk
- Image:
- Jeen Betting
- Design:
- Yannick Mortier