Kind: captions
Language: en
This is one of the tech boys mines. And
if you look all over the walls, there
are these scratches from where the
workers pickaxes have been.
But here, something else is going on.
There are about 30 or 40 of them all
over this place.
Some of these have been copied from
hieroglyphics, but some are completely
new. And here's how the system works.
You take the symbol and you say the
name, but you only take the first sound
and you discard the rest. So for
example, this here, this is an ox. You
can see the horns and the head here to
the minors. This would be alif. Now
alif, just take the first sound a
discard the rest. This is another
symbol. This is the symbol for house. To
them, it would be bait. So you just take
the B sound at the beginning and if you
put these two together you start
understanding what you're actually
looking at here. This is the birthplace
of the alphabet.
This new script was simpler to learn
than hieroglyphics because the alphabet
did not represent complete words but
spoken sounds.
It was able to convey any thought with
only 20 to 30 symbols.
These miners are the ones who gave birth
to this and their legacy is still with
us today and is so important.
In the centuries and millennia that
followed,
nearly all the early written languages
fell into obscurity as those
civilizations waned.
But this alphabet would only grow,
spreading across the planet, reshaping
and branching into many different forms.
It now forms the basis of most known
written languages,
allowing millions
and then billions of ordinary humans to
access knowledge, to communicate, and to
document their thoughts and their
existence
in every corner of the globe.
For me, this is one of the most powerful
moments in the human story because
unbeknownst to the underdog,
they had changed the world. One of
civilization's most profound and
revolutionary ideas didn't come from an
educated elite. It came from inside
these dark and miserable minds through
the copying and innovating of lowly
migrant workers.