Finalist · Round One

The First Sound

أول صوت

The birth of the alphabet in the Sinai mines.

At the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadim, a water-carrier boy scratches three signs into the rock (a horned head, a house, water) and uses them to call his father out of the shaft. His father cuts them into stone; four thousand years later another Sinai boy calls with the same sound.