Ideas · c. 1050 BCE
The Phoenician alphabet
Byblos (Lebanon)
Phoenician scribes in coastal cities such as Byblos used a script of just 22 letters, each standing for a consonant, developed from the earlier Proto-Sinaitic script, which was itself derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Its conventional starting date is c.
1050 BCE, and the inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Byblos, usually dated to around 1000 BCE, is the earliest known example of the fully developed alphabet.
Why it mattered
Carried by Phoenician traders around the Mediterranean, it became the ancestor of the Greek and Latin alphabets and, through Aramaic, of the Hebrew and Arabic scripts; a couple of dozen letters made reading and writing far easier to learn than systems with hundreds of signs.
Elsewhere
At Ugarit, scribes had earlier used a 30-letter alphabet written in cuneiform wedges (c. 1400 BCE), whose letter order resembles the Phoenician.
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