The Phoenician alphabet
Twenty-two letters, no vowels, and the ancestor of nearly every script in use.
- When
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
By around 1050 BCE the Phoenician cities have refined the earlier Semitic alphabet into a stable set of twenty-two consonantal signs written right to left. Carried by traders around the Mediterranean, it becomes the parent of Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic and the Indic scripts. Its virtue is economy: a system this small can be learned in days, which detaches literacy from the professional scribal class that syllabic scripts required.