Oldnewlands #12

On the Alphabet, a Secret Railway, and Kibbutz Be'eri

Something Old

“And the rest is history” is a good way to end a story, but only a couple of stories truly deserve it. Here is one of them.

Deep in the Sinai peninsula is an archeological site named Serabit el-Khadim, probably the most unlikely and forgotten site, a wonder of the world that you have never heard of. 4,000 years ago, this site was the source of turquoise, a gemstone worth going to the middle of the desert for, apparently. Today it is barely visited, as not much is there but an ancient temple, the likes of which can be seen elsewhere, to the goddess Hathor, matron of the miners. Still, a wonder of the world, I said. Why?

4,000 years ago, most of the great pyramids of Egypt were already built, proving that a prosperous civilization could rise using a writing system based on ideograms and logograms — idea-words. The term hieroglyphs (literally holy-carvings) comes from finding the script in temples and tombs. Using a hieroglyphic script is easy for Egyptian scribes who were taught it from a young age by their royal guardians, but note how limited the pool of potential users is! When slaves were brought to the mines from the north — today’s Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, things had to change. Recording their work using hieroglyphs was going to be as hard as mining itself!

Slaves are unfortunate, not stupid. To solve the problem, they probably recalled a concept already found in Mesopotamia at the time - phonetic writing (using cuneiform). Then, they found one Egyptian hieroglyph whose initial sound corresponds with a sound they knew from their language. For example, ‘Bayt’ in their language meant house, so the Egyptian hieroglyph ‘house’ would now represent the sound ‘B’. From that simple idea, we get the alphabet — ‘aleph’ is an ox, ‘bayt’ is a house, and so on.

Serabit el-Khadim is a wonder of the world, as I said. It is where human ingenuity showed itself in its most effortless and effective form, with the noblest end in mind — not money, power, or fame, but communication with others. The anti-military-industrial complex in full swing (OK, there was still slavery involved).

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Something New

There are mysterious reports on a “secret” international railway between Israel and the UAE that is being constructed. I was going to report it to you, thinking it might not have hit the headlines in the US, when I noticed something… The reporting on it was based on an alleged leak from Israel’s government that gave away the fact that our minister of transportation visited Dubai (in the UAE) to oversee developments regarding said railway.

After an initial report on i24 News, an Israeli news outlet, it spread to the rest of the world. But there is nothing beyond that except for one diagram of the future railway. So, make of it what you will. There might be a railway being built — the scoop was that it was being built during the war as well — through Saudi Arabia. Or maybe this is some sort of spin, or a way to “test the waters” to see if any strong public opinion emerges following this report. Who really knows?

Something Else

I recently joined a tour of Be’eri with a former member of the kibbutz who moved to Dalia (my kibbutz) after 10/7. This is the only photo I took this time, from inside the kibbutz’s kindergarten. On 10/7, the first wave of terrorists, holding detailed maps of Be’eri in their hands, stormed through the kibbutz to reach the kindergarten, a building they knew had bulletproof windows. The kibbutz was occupied by terrorists until dusk, and still had terrorists in it a day or two later.

Coincidentally, as I am writing this on Wednesday morning, news has just broken that the body of Be’eri’s last hostage — Dror Or — was returned yesterday. He was a good friend of our guide last week. Until now, houses in Be’eri that belonged to the victims, including Dror’s, were mostly left untouched since that day. Every piece of debris was still in them, along with personal items of their former residents. Graffiti in Arabic is still on the walls. These houses are both sacred and desecrated at the same time, and evidently no one has been feeling that cleaning up was even an option.

Maybe now, over two years later, healing will begin. Time will tell.