Black Adam and ancient alphabets
In which a Mesopotamian antihero speaks a magic word based on a quasi-Roman spelling of Egyptian gods' names... huh?
It’s foolish to nitpick the historical accuracy of a comic-book movie set in a fictitious ancient culture, I know, but I can’t help myself.
There’s a key plot point in Black Adam that has been bugging me ever since I saw the film, and, now that the studio has released the first ten minutes online, I can share what’s been bugging me and ask you all if I’m missing anything.
Specifically, I am wondering about the origin of the word “SHAZAM!”
This is the magic word that certain characters use to transform themselves into super-powered beings: Billy Batson becomes, well, Shazam (a hero who was originally known as Captain Marvel, but his name had to be changed to avoid confusion with a certain other company’s character), and Teth-Adam becomes Black Adam.
When the magic word was given to Billy Batson, a modern-day kid, he was told that the word was an acronym for six “immortal elders”, i.e. Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury—all of whom come from Greco-Roman mythology except for Solomon, who was an ancient Israelite king (and one whose claim to supernatural power rests almost entirely on apocryphal legends, not the Bible).
But Teth-Adam, who first appeared in the comics a few years after Billy Batson, is older than the Israelite kingdom and older than the first recorded Greco-Roman myths—in the comics, he was originally an ancient Egyptian, maybe even the son of Ramesses II—so when the wizards gave him the magic word, they had to base it on something else. And so, for Black Adam, the acronym refers to the Egyptian gods Shu, Heru (originally Hershef), Amon, Zehuti, Aton (originally Anpu), and Mehen (originally Menthu).
Black Adam’s back-story went through further revisions in the comics, and in the movie he is now identified as someone who lived in the fictitious country of Kahndaq in 2600 BC—about 1,400 years before Ramesses II. He also seems to be broadly Mesopotamian now. But the magic word that gives him his powers is still based on the Egyptian gods, as you can see at the 4:30 mark in the video below:
Now, here is what is bugging me. I have two basic questions:
First, what are the odds that this ancient language would divide the “sh” sound into two separate letters, the way that English does?
Second, did anybody even have an alphabet at that point in history?
People had writing back then, of course. But the Egyptians used hieroglyphics and the Mesopotamians used cuneiform, both of which are very complicated and use symbols that represent entire words. (I believe we see the people of Kahndaq use cuneiform in the film.) The earliest known alphabet—a simpler system that uses just a couple dozen symbols for sounds, and then builds words out of those sounds—was invented by the Canaanites circa 1800 BC, or about 800 years after this movie takes place.
So it seems unlikely to me that these wizards would have spelled out the magic word using any sort of alphabet, when they gave the word to Teth-Adam.
Perhaps they were spelling the word out phonetically? No, that argument doesn’t work, because there is no phonetic reason to separate the “sh” sound at the beginning of the word into two letters. In fact, the first god they cite is Shu, whose name also begins with a “sh” sound. So why cite Heru after Shu? Do they need a silent H?
And if the wizards were using an alphabet… Well, we know that many languages, both ancient and modern, use a single letter for the “sh” sound. Indeed, when I first saw the film, I thought of how Semitic languages like Hebrew use a single symbol for that sound—and the Canaanites who invented the alphabet were Semitic, too, so.1
By sheer coincidence, it was only a couple weeks after I saw the film that reports came out about the oldest complete Canaanite sentence being discovered on a lice comb from Lachish, in what is now modern-day Israel. Reading these reports, and what they had to say about the alphabet used on that comb, I felt kind of vindicated.
See, for example, these quotes from an article in Biblical Archaeology Review:
The inscription, carved into an ivory comb, dates to around 1700 BCE, only a century after most scholars believe the alphabet was invented. . . .
Most notable is the presence of the Semitic letter ś. This letter is a sibilant that disappeared in most North Semitic languages shortly after the invention of the alphabet. Those languages where the “ś” sound was preserved, like Hebrew, typically did not represent it with a separate letter but rather used the letter shin for both the “sh” and “ś” sounds. The presence of this letter, along with other paleographic clues, indicates that the script was used quite early in the development of the alphabet. The comb inscription, therefore, uses an early form of both the letters, which are more pictographic in style, and the Canaanite language, before the ś letter had fallen out of use.
So, the first alphabet was invented roughly 800 years after the prologue to Black Adam takes place. And the people who invented it had different letters for the “s” and “sh” sounds—but they still had only one letter for each sound. And when they lost one of those letters, they made the remaining letter do double duty, as a symbol for both sounds—but they still used only one letter to represent the “sh” sound.
That settles that, then, as far as I can see.
Incidentally, there are other things I could quibble with in that video clip, too.
For example, the opening voice-over states:
Before Rome, before Babylon, before the pyramids, there was Kahndaq. The first self-governing people on Earth . . .
Before the pyramids? Well, maybe. This prologue is set in 2600 BC, which is right around the time the Egyptians started building pyramids of their own, but those pyramids may have been inspired by the Mesopotamian ziggurats, which went back centuries earlier, possibly even as much as a thousand years earlier.
Also, what does “the first self-governing people” mean?
How large is a “people”? Rome and Babylon were cities. One of the oldest known cities in the world is Jericho, which had a protective wall as early as 9000 BC. Does the city have to build a kingdom, or an empire, to qualify as a “people”, as something larger than just a city? But then, how much of that larger territory would be “self-governing”, if it was ruled directly by the city itself?
What does it mean to be the first “self-governing” people? Wouldn’t the first organized society of any sort be self-governing? If there were no other societies in existence, who else could have governed them? Was there a people before Kahndaq that was not self-governed, i.e. that was governed by someone else? If so, who was the someone else, and who was governing them? Etc., etc., etc.
I know, I know, it’s only a comic-book movie. But like I say, I can’t help myself.
I wouldn’t say questions like these keep me up at night, but they don’t exactly put me to sleep, either. So if there’s anything I’m missing—if there is some way that the wizards’ recitation of ancient Egyptian gods can be matched to some form of written communication that existed in ancient Mesopotamia—then by all means, let me know.
I am aware of the biblical tradition which says the Canaanites were descendants of Noah’s son Ham, rather than Shem. But the Canaanite language was Semitic.