3 ms·

What surprises me is that the Egyptians didn't invent an alphabet. They had 24 hieroglyphs (uniliteral hieroglyphs) that each represented a single phoneme. They

• ljf 6y ago
  I wonder how much of that was about firmly keeping the ownership of 'writing' in the hands of the elite? Writing in that way would have been extremely costly, and so is another use of wealth in a vastly wealthy country?
  • samatman 6y ago
    Possible, the scribes of Egypt were reasonably powerful and powerful classes do like to protect their own interests. But not necessary. Japanese invented syllabaries twice, and has added them to the writing system, rather than ditching the logographic system they learned from the Chinese. The Hangul were rejected for a few hundred years before Korea settled on actually using them. Writing is sticky.