>>Because they never thought of it as components.
Earth, Air, Fire, Water... THESE were their ideas for the elements.<<

See here:

[www.hallofmaat.com]

The architects of the pyramids knew about the elements, but they could not explain them to the locals in Hellas, Egypt, or elsewhere. That's why they had to encode them and use every day notions like water, earth, etc which simple people could easily perceive. They thus planned these words to encode relative data. To do this they had to invent the alphabet.