Where did the alphabet come from?
You know your ABCs — twenty-six letters that can spell anything from "pizza" to "tyrannosaurus." But nobody woke up one morning and invented A through Z all at once. Our alphabet has a wild backstory that stretches back almost four thousand years, crossing deserts and oceans, getting borrowed and remixed by civilization after civilization like the world's longest game of telephone.
The story starts in ancient Egypt, where people wrote in hieroglyphs — tiny pictures of birds, eyes, and wavy lines. Each picture stood for a sound or a whole word. Complicated, sure, but it worked. Then, around 2000 BCE, workers in Egyptian mines had a genius idea: what if we just picked one simple symbol for each sound our mouths make, instead of drawing a whole bird every time?
