He — 𐤄
Fifth letter of the Phoenician alphabet.
Before E, there was He.
𐤄 is the fifth of the twenty-two letters of the Phoenician alphabet. In this consonantal writing system, it represents the sound /h/.
The history of He is particularly revealing: when the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, they retained the letter but changed its function.
A consonant became a vowel.
An origin that is difficult to reconstruct
Like several letters of the Phoenician alphabet, He has a history that reaches back to the earliest alphabetic systems of the ancient Near East.
Its pictographic origin, however, is not as clearly established as that of Aleph or Beth.
Some traditions associate the name He with a window. Other reconstructions of early alphabetic signs connect its ancestor with a human figure with raised arms, possibly associated with an exclamation or expression of jubilation.
These proposed connections remain reconstructions and should not be presented as certain.
What can be established much more securely is the function of the letter in the Phoenician alphabet:
𐤄 represents the consonant /h/.
With He, the original image has largely disappeared behind the written sign.
From He to Epsilon
When the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, they also adopted its fifth letter.
But they gave it a new function.
Phoenician He, which represented the consonant /h/, was used to represent the vowel sound /e/ and became the Greek letter:
Epsilon — Ε
This transformation forms part of one of the major innovations of the Greek alphabet: several Phoenician consonantal signs were reassigned to represent vowels explicitly.
The letter was later transmitted through the alphabets of ancient Italy and into the Latin alphabet.
It became the Latin E that we still use today.
𐤄 → Ε → E
The graphic form changed relatively little.
Its function, however, changed profoundly:
from a consonant to a vowel.
He and Byblos
In Byblos, He also allows us to observe another aspect of alphabetic history: the way the graphic form of a letter could continue to change over time.
In 1923, Pierre Montet discovered a small altar bearing a Phoenician inscription in the area of the temples at Byblos.
When the inscription was studied, the particular form of He attracted attention. Its principal strokes appear separated, showing that the shape of the letter was not fixed once and for all.
The sign continued to evolve.
From archaic inscriptions to much later examples, its form changed according to period and writing tradition.
At Byblos, He therefore bears witness not only to the transmission of an alphabet, but also to the long life of an evolving written form.
Conclusion
With He, the history of the alphabet is no longer simply the history of a changing shape.
The Phoenician letter 𐤄, which represented the consonant /h/, became Epsilon — Ε in Greek, where it was used as a vowel, before giving rise to the Latin E.