The Alphabet versus the Goddess

Phoenicia, Canaan, and Egypt are advanced as the three most likely sources of the alphabet. Yet, most archeologists acknoledge that the oldest alphabet discovered is the one found in the Sinai desert. In 1905, Sir William Flinders Petrie found a script resembling Hebrew letters, art the site of an Egyptian temple dedicated to a goddess. Surrounding the area were rocks upon which Petrie found further evidence of this alphabet. Petrie called these precursor letters, dated at around 1800 B.C., the Proto-sinaic alphabet. Few challenge the fact that the sinaic inscriptions are the oldest known alphabet script. Petrie descovered them in one of the most moon-crumbled remains of empires, few water sources and hardly any vegetation; yet, evidence of the oldest alphabet stared at him across the millennia from the craggy surfaces of sun-baked rocks.
The numerous exotic place-names of the ancient world are redolent with oriental opulence and stirring events. Egyptian wall paintings and hieroglyphs sumptuously record the grand pageantry of Thebes, Memphis, and Karnak. The Babylonian cities of Ur, Uruk, and Nineveh call to mind scenes of intrigues, battles, and coronations.
There is only one major event associated with the name "Sinai". It was here that Yahweh gave Moses the Ten Commandments for the Hebrew people. It seems like an exraordinary coincidence and a striking intersection of myth and science that the oldest alphabet was found in the place where "the" seminal episode in the history of the ancient Hebrews occurred.
The biblical version of what transpired in the Sinai recounts the rededication of an entire people to their solitary God. Monotheism was a revolutionary idea, and many believe it is the primary legacy of the Hebrewq to future generations.
The other revolutionary idea emerging in the Sinai shaped the future of all human aspirations: Yahweh proclaimed that there exists a code of morality that stands above human intercourse. The Ten Commandments applied "universally" to everyone. No King, pharaoh, or potentate was above the law. If human society was to be organized on a principle other than "might makes right", all would to submit. The codes of Draco, Solon, and Justinian, the Magna Carta, the United States Constitution, and the Miranda rights can all be traced back to what happened in the Sinai.
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Perhaps the transforming event that transpired so long ago at the foot of Mount Sinai was the invention of the alphabat.

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan proposed that a civilization's principal means of communication molds it more than the content of that communication. McLuhan classified speech, pictographs, ideographs, alphabets, print, radio, film, and television as distinctive information-conveying media, each with its own technology of transmission. He declared that these technologies insinuate themselves into the collective psyche of any society that uses them, and once embedded, stealthily exert a powerful influence on cultural perceptions.
McLuhan aphorism, "the medium is the message", is the leitmotiv of this book. Robert Logan, the author of "The Alphabet Effect", expounded on this idea:

"A medium fo communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities. A person who is literate has a different world than on who receives information exclusively through oral communication. The alphabet, independent of the spoken languages it transcribes or the information it makes available, has its own intrinsic impacts.

While McLuhan, Logan, and others have explored many of the effects that alphabetic literacy has had upon Western history, I wish to narrow the focus to a single question: how did the invention of the alphabet affect the balance of power between men and women?
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Literacy has promoted the subjugation of women by men throughout all but the very recent history of the West. Misogyny and patriarchy rise and fall with the fortunes ot the alphabetic word.
The key to my thesis lie in the unique way the human nervous system developed, wich in turn allowed alphabets to profoundly affect gender relations.

Aside from the benefits that derived from their ease of use, alphabets produced a subtle change in cognition that redirected human thinking. For sophisticated neurolinguistic reasons the early practionners could not have known, alphabets reinforced only half of the dual strategy that humans had evolved to survive. As we have seen, this strategy had three components: left brain/right brain, cone/rod, and right hand/left hand. Each tripartite half of this duality perceived and reacted to the world in a different way; a unified response emerged only when when both complementary halves were used.