Comment by johnwatson11218

I've read that by the end of ancient Egyptian history they had used tricks like a picture of an eye for the letter or sound 'I' or a picture of a bee for the sound of 'B' there was a complete alphabet embedded within the system. To be literate you had to know the tricks from the ancient and middle kingdoms as well. The result was three complete alphabets, similar to modern Japanese. From that point of view the invention of the alphabet was more of a simplification. This always reminded me of the situation in modern enterprise development where lots of infrastructure was written in-house.