The earliest example of our alphabet — a possible mnemonic phrase that helped someone remember “ABCD” — has been discovered on a 3,400-year-old inscribed piece of pottery from ancient Egypt, a scholar believes.
Three of the words start with the ancient equivalent of B, C and D, creating what may be a mnemonic phrase.
Thomas Schneider, a professor of Egyptology and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia, reported the discovery in a paper published recently in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. This discovery “would be the first historical attestation of ‘our’ alphabet sequence,” he told Live Science in an email.
Modern-day scholars sometimes call the early ancestor of our ABCD alphabet sequence the “abgad” sequence, because this phrase mentions some of the first letters of the early version of our alphabet. Until this discovery, the oldest example of this sequence had only dated back about 3,200 years, Schneider wrote in his paper. Read more.