Phoenician alphabet

Lore & Background

The Phoenician alphabet proper uses 22 consonant letters—as an abjad used to write a Semitic language, it leaves vowel sounds implicit—though late varieties sometimes used matres lectionis to denote some vowels. As its letters were originally incised using a stylus, their forms are mostly angular and straight, though cursive forms increased in use over time, culminating in the Neo-Punic alphabet used in Roman North Africa. The earliest known proto-alphabetic inscriptions are the Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai Peninsula and in Canaan in the late Middle and Bronze Age. The script was not widely used until the rise of Syro-Hittite states in the 13th and 12th centuries BC. The Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the 'Proto-Canaanite' script of the Bronze Age collapse period. The inscriptions found on the Phoenician arrowheads at al-Khader near Bethlehem and dated c. The Ahiram epitaph, whose dating is controversial, engraved on the sarcophagus of king Ahiram in Byblos, Lebanon, one of five known Byblian royal inscriptions, shows essentially the fully developed Phoenician script, although the name 'Phoenician' is by convention given to inscriptions beginning in the mid-11th century BC.

Reader's Guide

The Phoenician alphabet's attractive innovation was its phonetic nature, in which one sound was represented by one symbol, which meant only a few dozen symbols to learn. The other scripts of the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, employed many complex characters and required long professional training to achieve proficiency; which had restricted literacy to a small elite. Another reason for its success was the maritime trading culture of Phoenician merchants, which spread the alphabet into parts of North Africa and Southern Europe. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos (in present-day Lebanon) and Carthage in North Africa. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt. The alphabet had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. Its simplicity not only allowed its easy adaptation to multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of literacy as an exclusive achievement of royal and religious elites, scribes who used their monopoly on information to control the common population. The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms, such as Assyria, Babylonia and Adiabene, would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the Common Era. According to Herodotus, the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet—phoinikeia grammata 'Phoenician letters'—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet. Its direct descendant scripts include the Aramaic and Samaritan alphabets, several Alphabets of Asia Minor, and the Archaic Greek alphabets.

Did You Know?

• The Phoenician alphabet was the first to have a fixed writing direction, written horizontally from right to left.
• It used 22 consonant letters, with vowel sounds left implicit, though late varieties sometimes used matres lectionis.