Thanks to archaeological and epigraphic discoveries in the last century, we know that alphabetic writing—one of the most important technological innovations in human history—emerged over 4,000 years ago within the context of Egyptian-Levantine cultural contact. Yet many questions remain: What cultural practices led to the rise of the alphabet? Who invented it? When, where, and for what purpose(s)? How and why was it transmitted? This project will create an interdisciplinary community of inquiry at the University of Chicago centered on these questions. We will bring together an international group of collaborators working in archaeology, epigraphy, linguistics, and digital humanities, promoting discourse through a symposium hosted at the Neubauer Collegium. Our goal is to advance the study of alphabetic origins by (1) producing a new digital edition of the earliest alphabetic inscriptions based on state-of-the-art images; (2) creating a database to trace the transmission of alphabetic writing; and (3) drawing on parallels from more recently invented writing systems to better understand the social forces that drive the creation of new scripts. We anticipate the project to fill critical gaps in scholarship on the invention and transmission of the alphabet, publishing findings via diverse media for wide scholarly and public reach. We will make our digital edition and database freely available through UChicago’s CORPUS platform, enabling future research on the alphabet while placing UChicago at the forefront of humanistic inquiry on the rise of a writing system still in global use today.