The phonogram led to the alphabet. The scribes in seeking a way to shorten their work found that the syllable itself could be broken up into separate sounds. For example, when they came to the syllable whose sound is spelled by our three letters pad, they found that it had three distinct sounds, namely: (1) one a lip sound which could be represented by the first sound of the picture-sign
(a door); (2) one an open-throat or vowel sound which could be represented by the first sound of the picture-sign
(an eagle); (3) one a dental sound which could be represented by the first sound in the picture-sign
(a hand). So the scribes wrote the syllable (p-a-d) with the three characters
. And so with all the other sounds in the Egyptian language; each was represented by one of the picture-signs already used. Since there were only about twenty-five distinct elementary sounds in the Egyptian language, twenty-five picture-signs were sufficient to represent any sound or any word in the language. These twenty-five picture-sounds were the letters of the Egyptian alphabet. Twenty-five characters instead of thousands! Now the Egyptian youth could learn to read in three or four years, whereas under the old system it took fifteen or twenty years, just as it takes fifteen or twenty years for the Chinese youth to learn to read well.
Now that its origin has been explained, the story of the alphabet may be rapidly told. Indeed, its whole history can be learned from Figure 5. In column (a) are the three Egyptian picture-signs referred to above. Column (b) shows how the rapid writing of the priests reduced the old hieroglyphics to script;