Alphabet
Writing Home
It is widely acknowledged that the extinction of a language is a devastating cultural loss for ethnic minorities, but these Nubians raise a different question: What happens when an alphabet disappears? And is it possible — or even desirable — to save a script?
The Riddle of the Sinai Sphinx
A small sphinx in the Sinai’s Temple of Hathor had carried a riddle for millennia. In solving it, archaeologists discovered how turquoise miners from the East had replaced hieroglyphs with letters and invented the alphabet.