The Story of the Word "Alpha"

The word Alpha was probably introduced when Britannia was part of the Roman Empire (43-410 AD). Latin native speakers came over from the continent and added their words to the mix of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic languages.      
     
Alpha was the first letter of the Latin alphabet. The Romans took it from the Greeks, who must have learned it from the Phoenicians (Greek name for Canaanites) while trading with them across the Mediterranean (Phoenicia/Canaan is roughly current-day Lebanon).      
     
The Canaanites are credited with the invention of the ancestor of our current writing system about 3,000 years ago. They didn’t ‘create the alphabet from nothing’ but probably developed it from Egyptian hieroglyphics which are at least 5000 years old.      
     
The Canaanites used names for their letters which are still used in Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew. The first letter in this ancient alphabet was called ‘aleph’ and meant ‘ox’. The second letter was ‘bayt’ and meant ‘house’.      
     
When the Greeks adopted the Canaanite alphabet they changed the letters ‘aleph’ and ‘bayt’ to ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ because they found them easier to pronounce; hence also the word ‘alphabet’.      
     
In the 19th and 20th centuries, it became trendy to use alpha in various scientific disciplines. Around 1900 it was used by physicists who separated radiation into three types of waves, naming them alpha, beta, and gamma, the first three letters of the Greek alphabet.      
     
In 1924 a German psychiatrist (Hans Berger) invented the EEG, a method for recording ‘brain waves’.  He called them after the first five letters of the Greek alphabet, adding delta and theta.      
     
In 1947 the Swiss animal behaviourist Rudolf Schenkel published a study on the behaviour of wolves. Schenkel had observed wolves in the Zoo of Zurich, and from his observations he developed the ‘dominance theory’. In that study Schenkel mentions the words ‘α-animals’, ‘α-bitch’, and ‘α-position’ a few times. Nowhere does he use the actual word ‘alpha’. He could have used the number ‘1’ instead of the Greek letter ‘α’ .      
     
By 1960, the ‘dominance theory’ became very popular, and the words ‘alpha-male’ and ‘alpha-female’ were used in scientific language, mainly in studies of primates.      
     
In 1970 David Mech, an American wolf expert, published The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species. The book promoted the concept of ‘alpha-animals’ in wolf packs. This book spread the word ‘alpha’ in the sense of social status among animals into general language.    
     
By this time of course, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and concepts of natural selection (first published in 1859) was well established in the Western Cultural Mind. It served as a solid foundation for the dominance theory to take off because it encouraged people to draw conclusions from animal behaviour to human behaviour. In the 1990s ‘alpha-words’ were applied to humans as well.      
     
Fast forward to 2020, and we can now find hundreds of websites offering ‘alpha-training’ online — not just for dog owners but for humans themselves. Men and women are encouraged to ‘become an alpha-male/female’, to ‘dress like an alpha-male/female’, and  to develop ‘alpha-characteristics’. In the same vein, women and men are told to look out for ‘signs you’re dating an alpha-male/female’. Nobody wants to date a ‘beta-person’, apparently, if they can have an ‘alpha’.      
     
BUT, in the meantime David Mech, the wolf expert, and his fellow scientists had done more research and found that the concept of the ‘alpha wolf’ is outdated. It was all a mistake! On his website he writes, “Most wolves who lead packs achieved their position simply by mating and producing pups, which then became their pack. In other words they are merely breeders, or parents, and that’s all we call them today, the ‘breeding male’, ‘breeding female’, or ‘male parent’, ‘female parent’.”    
     
In the second decade of the 21st century, there is no scientific evidence to support that ‘alpha-behaviour’ exists among animals. Psychologists, animal experts, and journalists tell us that the whole ‘alpha-dominance-story’ is a myth and issue warnings that it may be harmful and destructive.    
     
But ignoring the corrective science, the conceptual appeal of being an alpha-person has boomed. Sports, film, and pop culture is studded with ‘alpha-celebrities’, both male and female. Politicians defend sexist speech and actions of colleagues as ‘alpha male boasting’. Being an ‘alpha-male’ is used as an excuse for abusive and bullish behaviour. Which brings us back to the original meaning of the word ‘aleph’, or ‘ox’…    
     
The ancient Canaanites and Semites probably didn’t use the word ‘ox’ in the sense of a ‘castrated bull,’ like today. In many Mediterranean regions, bulls (ancestors of domestic cattle) were worshipped for their strength and potency. Now extinct, they roamed wild and were rarely tamed. But why did the Canaanite language, followed by Arabic, Hebrew, Greek & Latin use this ox as a symbol for the first letter of their alphabet?    
     
We know that the bull, in this case a synonym of ox, was worshipped by the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians. It symbolised the Earth and also the taming of the masculine and animal nature.      
     
The Canaanites and other Semites worshipped the goddess Astarte. As a sign of her sovereignty she wears the horns of a bull. Europa, the Phoenician princess after whom Europe is named, can be seen on Greek paintings riding a white bull. The story behind it is the god Zeus turned himself into a bull to abduct and seduce the beautiful princess.    
     
In Egyptian mythology the bull was an avatar of Ra, the god of the sun. Every night after sunset, the sun god disappeared in the belly of the earth goddess Nut, who gave birth to him again the following morning.      
     
The Egyptian creation story offers perhaps the best explanation how the letter aleph, as the glyph of an ox head, became alpha as a representation of new beginnings — a timely thought at the beginning of 2020.