Tracing the Origins of Writing and Civilization

Tracing the Origins of Writing and Civilization

A Conversation

 

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A Meeting at the Seminary

In the spring of 2025, we met at the San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, California. The seminary’s library, perched on the top floor with its musty smell, arched windows and creaking wood floors, felt like the right place for what we were about to discuss.

The discussion started with the question: What if everything we know about the origins of civilization, language, and sacred literature is—at best—a speculative and theoretical endeavor, strung together from incomplete data and layered interpretations, all seeking a coherent story in a broken mirror?

With this spirit of curiosity, we began.

The Transition from Oral to Written Language

Ed Reither: I want to start this discussion from ‘Rudolf Pfeiffer’s book, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age.’ Pfeiffer’s Introduction to the Old Testament, Chapter 2, The Shophists, their Contemporaries, and Publils in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries, which I know you already familiar where he emphasizes the complexity and fragmentary evidence behind early writing systems. I want to ask: What if early written language, such as Hebrew, evolved from Egyptian sources.  I know Pfeiffer is talking about the Greeks but I want to expand that? Where do we begin to trace that?

Frank Sutor: A good place to begin is with the cultural landscape of the ancient Near East*. The Egyptians developed a system of hieroglyphs around 3100 BCE—largely pictorial, used initially for ceremonial or elite inscriptions. Over time, this system became more abstract.

*The term “Near East,” they are referring to a region that encompasses the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Levant, essentially the eastern Mediterranean and surrounding areas. This area is often considered the birthplace of Western civilization. The term “Near East” is a modern-age designation, and the region was formerly known as the Middle East. 

Now, when you mention Hebrew, you’re pointing to a language that belongs to the Northwest Semitic family. This includes Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, and Canaanite dialects. The earliest known alphabetic script—Proto-Sinaitic—dates to around 1800 BCE and shows signs of having been influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Ed: So Proto-Sinaitic is like a transitional form?

Frank: Yes. It’s often seen as a bridge. Scholars believe Semitic*-speaking workers in Egyptian-controlled mines at Serabit el-Khadim developed these simplified, abstract signs to record their own words—modeled loosely on Egyptian hieroglyphs. This may be the first alphabet. From there, Phoenician emerged around 1050 BCE as the first mature alphabetic script, with only consonants (abjad). Hebrew, a Canaanite dialect, adopted and adapted this.

*What Does “Semitic” Mean? “Semitic” is a linguistic category, not an ethnic or racial one. It refers to a family of related languages, including: Akkadian (Babylonian, Assyrian), Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amorite, Canaanite, Arabic (later), Ethiopic (later). The term “Semitic” comes from Shem, one of Noah’s sons in biblical tradition, but this is a 19th-century academic coinage—not a term ancient peoples used for themselves.

Ed: That seems to imply a directional flow—the evolution of writing systems from the richly symbolic and elaborate Egyptian hieroglyphs to the more streamlined, alphabetic scripts—developed by Semitic-speaking peoples—most notably Phoenician scripts. So Hebrew is not born in isolation; it comes out of another language group.

Frank: Exactly. Hebrew arises in a broader ancient near eastern language context—shaped by Egyptian influence, Canaanite language patterns, and Phoenician script. It’s a convergence, not a single-point origin.

Ed: That clarifies a lot. But “Semitic” is not only a very “highened” and ‘poorly used term today it often causes confusion. Who exactly are these Semitic peoples in historical terms?

Frank: Linguistically, Semitic refers to a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. It includes:

• Akkadian (Babylonian/Assyrian)

• Aramaic

• Phoenician

• Hebrew

• Arabic

• Ugaritic

Geographically, these peoples lived across Mesopotamia, the Levant (modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan), parts of Arabia, and Ethiopia. It’s a linguistic category—not racial or ethnic.

Ed: Got it. So when tracing writing, we’re tracing cultural intersections—not isolated civilizations.

Frank: Precisely. The movement of scripts and sounds follows trade, conquest, religion, and necessity.

Ed: I’d like to continue the river metaphor, but expand it eastward. What about India’s relationship with Egypt?

Frank: An important and often underrepresented connection. For centuries, the relationship between ancient India and Egypt has lingered on the edges of historical memory—occasionally hinted at in early European scholarship, often marginalized by mainstream academia.

Ed: I’ve developed a framework that tries to reintroduce this into the narrative:

For centuries, the connection between ancient India and Egypt has hovered in the background of historical memory—hinted at through myth, echoed in sacred texts, and occasionally acknowledged by early explorers and orientalists. Yet only in the past 150 years has Western academic scholarship taken even a modestly serious look at the possibility that the Nile Valley and the Indus River basin shared more than commerce—they may have shared culture, cosmology, and the very foundations of what we now call civilization.

This hesitation—if not outright neglect—has left a deeper wound: a blindness to the unity of human development across race, geography, and doctrine.

Frank: That’s sharply stated. Your inclusion of John Pickering’s 1843 address and the broader context of early Orientalist inquiry helps frame the 19th-century moment when scholars began to suspect that the East had not only influenced the West but may have helped birth it.

Ed: Yes—and Pickering’s remarks to the American Oriental Society echo this renewed curiosity. He emphasized that:

“All the nations of the East… have become more willing than formerly to encourage free intercourse. Modern science and art have lent their aid… enabling us to accomplish, within the span of a few years, what it may have taken our predecessors many generations to achieve.”

Pickering was looking to elevate historical insight beyond European provincialism.

Frank: And it’s worth emphasizing that many early European philologists did see India as central:

• Egypt’s mythologies and cosmologies, in some views, echoed or were influenced by Vedic forms.

• Sacred traditions migrated not just westward, but in circular, entangled flows that defy linear historical models.

Ed: The temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari even shows Punt—a sacred homeland with flora, fauna, and figures that scholars have argued resemble Indian imagery.

Frank: Which ties into broader theories of ancient diffusion—where sacred geography, symbolism, and ritual practice moved not as exports, but as expressions of a deeper shared origin.

Ed: This wasn’t just a trickle of goods—it was an intellectual current. Alexandria, for example, was not only home to the Great Library but also a meeting point of Hellenic, Egyptian, Jewish, and potentially Indian traditions.

Frank: Indeed. Indian sages and merchants were known in Alexandria. Trade ports like Muziris didn’t just carry spices—they carried cosmologies.

Ed: That’s the deeper point. Not to invert the myth of Western origin and place it in India instead, but to recover the deeper entanglement of wisdom traditions—rooted in unity, nature, cosmology, and moral clarity.

Frank: And in that light, the Indo-Nile current becomes not an anomaly—but a vital artery of ancient thought. It’s time we restored it to our maps of origin, not as fantasy or overreach, but as a real and necessary path of intellectual history.

Ed: I think we should end with a realistic understanding. This dialogue is no different than a scholarly book like Pfeiffer’s. Bits of data are turned into conjectured facts, and conjectured facts are arranged like a puzzle—missing pieces and all—to make a story.

Frank: And we’ve taken that model and stretched it further. Instead of pretending completeness, we’ve opened the door to speculative reconstruction. We’ve said: This is plausible, not proven.

Ed: Which is what ancient history mostly is. A tentative story, always in draft form.

Frank: Yes. But also—one shaped by values. By curiosity, openness, and the humility to admit we do not know. That’s what makes this not just scholarship, but a living inquiry.

Ed: And so we close the book, or at least this volume, with a question still open, the ink still wet, and the mirror still cracked—but maybe a little clearer for the asking.

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