The Phoenician Alphabet
The Phoenicians spread an alphabet of twenty-two letters around the Mediterranean and almost every alphabet in use today descends from it. The system was not their invention in the strict sense. It developed out of the Proto-Sinaitic script of the second millennium, in which Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt took Egyptian signs and used them for the first sound of the Semitic word for the object depicted — an ox head for the sound of aleph, a house for bet. What the Phoenicians did was standardise it into a compact, linear, consonantal script of twenty-two signs and carry it everywhere they traded. The advantage over cuneiform and hieroglyphs is decisive. A system of several hundred or several thousand signs requires a professional scribal class trained for years, and a system of twenty-two can be learned by a merchant in a few weeks. Writing stopped being the property of temples and palaces. The Greeks adopted it in the eighth century BC and made the change that produced the modern alphabet: they had signs left over for Semitic consonants their language did not use, and assigned them to vowels. From Greek it went to Etruscan and then to Latin, and separately to Cyrillic; from Aramaic, a related branch, it produced the Hebrew, Arabic and Indian scripts. The Greeks called the letters Phoenician and named the writing material after Byblos, which is where the word Bible comes from. The Phoenicians themselves left almost no literature. They wrote on papyrus, which does not survive in the Levantine climate, so a civilisation that gave the world writing is known chiefly through what its enemies and customers wrote about it.
- Year: 1050 BCE
- Category: Cultural
