Alpha α

Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, adopted from the Phoenician aleph ('ox'); the Greeks turned the Semitic consonant into the vowel 'a'. Its isopsephy value is 1. Alpha carries strong genuine symbolism: as the first letter it means 'the beginning' or 'the foremost', and in the Book of Revelation (1:8, 21:6, 22:13) God and Christ are named 'the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end', pairing the first and last Greek letters as a title of eternity.

The Greek letters doubled as numerals in the Milesian (alphabetic) system, in which each letter carried a fixed value; the practice of summing a word's letters into a number, called isopsephy, is the Greek counterpart of Hebrew gematria and appears in inscriptions, the Greek Magical Papyri and early Christian texts. Alpha's Aegean origin sits at a disputed point of contact between Greek speakers and Phoenician traders, variously placed at Al Mina, Cyprus, Crete or Euboea; wherever it happened, the borrowing that produced Alpha and the rest of the Greek alphabet from Phoenician consonantal script, conventionally dated to around the 8th century BCE, is the ancestor of every European alphabet still in use, including the Latin one covered elsewhere in this atlas. Alpha itself heads that borrowed series and, as one of the Greek vowels, was also chanted and inscribed in the seven-vowel formulae of the Greco-Egyptian magical papyri, sequences of vowel sounds valued in that tradition for their ritual potency. Its isopsephy value of 1 belongs to the Milesian alphabetic numeral system, which also needed three further, otherwise obsolete letters, digamma (also called stigma), koppa and sampi, to cover every value from 1 up to 900; none of the three survives among the 24 letters in ordinary use today.

Greek writing itself changed shape long after alpha's ancient religious and numerical roles, covered elsewhere in this atlas, were fixed. Classical inscriptions used only capital letters; a cursive minuscule hand developed gradually through the Byzantine period and was standardised by scribes around the 9th century CE, giving Greek the lowercase forms, alpha included, still used in print today.

In modern science alpha denotes the first in a numbered or ranked series far removed from any ancient use: physicists call the helium nucleus emitted in radioactive decay an alpha particle, a name Ernest Rutherford gave it in 1899 when he sorted newly discovered radiation into alpha, beta and gamma types by penetrating power; astronomers, following the 17th-century Bayer system for naming stars, generally label the brightest star in a constellation Alpha, as in Alpha Centauri; and software developers call an early, unfinished test release an alpha version, the first stage before a beta release.

None of these modern technical senses existed before the 19th or 20th century, and none carries over any of alpha's ancient gematria or scriptural associations discussed elsewhere in this atlas, even where the word alpha itself, as in an alpha predator or an alpha personality, has drifted into everyday English well beyond any of these technical fields.