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.