Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

by Maryanne Wolf

Another surprising discovery about the Ugaritic script involves its use of an “abecedary,” as linguists call any system that lists the letters of a script in a fixed order. A curious item in the history of writing is that the same sequence in the Ugaritic abecedary characterized a second-millennium proto-Canaanite script, which went on to become the Phoenician consonantal system, which went on to become the Greek alphabet—or so the widely accepted account goes. Thus the abecedary is evidence of a link between these two candidates for early alphabets and also suggests some early schooling system that standardized the learning of letters in a fixed order. Like the Sumerians’ use of lists, such an ordering gives novice readers a cognitive strategy for more easily remembering the characters of their script. But the use of this fascinating script ended when invaders destroyed Ugarit around 1200 BCE.