It is a three-foot high stone containing hieroglyphs, everyday ancient Egyptian ... did not have symbols for vowels (‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’ or ‘u’), but the alphabet below includes ...

The inscription’s symbols—a bull’s head on a pole, followed by two storks and an ibis—are similar to those used in later Egyptian writing to equate a pharaoh’s authority with control ...

The accepted story is that the first alphabet developed in the Sinai Peninsula around 1,900 B.C., an innovation on Egyptian hieroglyphics, but a discovery in a tomb in Syria challenges that narrative.