Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad, which means it is a consonantal alphabet, used by the Phoenician people in the Mediterranean for most of the first millennium BC. It was one of the earliest alphabets and is important in the history of writing systems because it was the first to have a fixed writing direction. Unlike earlier systems that could be written in multiple directions, the Phoenician alphabet was always written horizontally, from right to left.

It developed from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which came from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Phoenician alphabet was used to write several Canaanite languages spoken during the Early Iron Age, including Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite.

Because Phoenician merchants traveled widely across the Mediterranean, they shared their alphabet with many other cultures, who adapted it for their own languages. The Phoenician alphabet was used in Ancient Carthage until the 2nd century BC to write the Punic language. It also influenced many other writing systems, including the Aramaic and Samaritan alphabets, several Alphabets of Asia Minor, and the Archaic Greek alphabets.

The Phoenician alphabet had 22 consonant letters. Since it was designed for Semitic languages, vowel sounds were usually not written, although later versions sometimes used certain letters, called matres lectionis, to show some vowels. The letters were originally made with straight, angular lines because they were carved with a stylus, and over time more flowing, cursive shapes developed, leading to the Neo-Punic alphabet used in Roman North Africa.

History

Origin

Further information: Proto-Sinaitic script and Proto-Canaanite script

The earliest known writings that look like our modern alphabet are the Proto-Sinaitic script, found in places like the Sinai Peninsula and Canaan during the late Middle and Late Bronze Age. This script wasn’t used much until the rise of some new states around the 13th and 12th centuries BC.

The Phoenician alphabet grew directly from the “Proto-Canaanite” script during a big change in the ancient world. Important writings, like the one on the Phoenician arrowheads found near Bethlehem, show the link between the two. Another important writing is the Ahiram epitaph, carved on a king’s stone box in Byblos, Lebanon. It shows the Phoenician script almost fully formed, even though we usually say the Phoenician alphabet started around the mid-11th century BC.

Spread and adaptations

Further information: History of the alphabet

Starting in the 9th century BC, people changed the Phoenician alphabet to make new ones, like the Greek, Old Italic, and Anatolian scripts. The big advantage of this alphabet was that each symbol stood for one sound, so you only needed to learn a few dozen symbols. Other writing systems at the time, like cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, used many complicated symbols and needed a lot of training to learn. Only a few special people could read and write them.

The Phoenician people were great traders, and they spread the alphabet to places in North Africa and Southern Europe because of their sea voyages. We’ve found Phoenician writings in many old cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos in Lebanon and Carthage in North Africa. Later discoveries show that it was used even earlier in places like Egypt.

Because it was so simple, this alphabet could be used by many people, not just kings, priests, or special writers. This changed societies where only a few people could read and write, breaking down some old class differences. Even though places like Assyria, Babylonia, and Adiabene kept using cuneiform for important documents, the Phoenician way of writing influenced many.

According to the writer Herodotus, a Phoenician prince named Cadmus brought the Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks, who changed it to make their own Greek alphabet. Herodotus said the Greeks didn’t know about this writing before Cadmus came. He thought Cadmus lived 1,600 years before his own time, but the real use of the alphabet by Greeks was only about 350 years before Herodotus wrote about it.

The Phoenician alphabet was also known to wise teachers from ancient Jewish times, who called it the “Old Hebrew” or Paleo-Hebrew writing.

Notable inscriptions

Main article: Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions

People decided that the Phoenician script began around 1050 BC because there aren’t many writings from the 11th century BC. The oldest writings we have are from the 10th century BC.

• KAI 1: Ahiram sarcophagus, Byblos, around 1000 BC.
• KAI 14: Sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II, 5th century BC
• KAI 15–16: Bodashtart inscriptions, 4th century BC
• KAI 24: Kilamuwa Stela, 9th century BC
• KAI 46: Nora Stone, around 800 BC
• KAI 47: Cippi of Melqart writing, 2nd century BC
• KAI 26: Karatepe bilingual, 8th century BC
• KAI 277: Pyrgi Tablets, writing in Phoenician and Etruscan, around 500 BC
• Çineköy writing, writing in Phoenician and Luwian, 8th century BC

Lebanon’s office for old things has collected many written objects from different times to show how the Phoenician alphabet changed over time. These objects belong to the country and are shown in the National Museum of Beirut, sometimes traveling to other places. The oldest one is the Ahiram sarcophagus. This group of writings helped Lebanon apply to have the Phoenician alphabet recognized by UNESCO as very important worldwide history. UNESCO agreed in 2005.

Modern rediscovery

The Phoenician alphabet was understood in 1758 by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, but people didn’t know it came from the Phoenicians until the 1800s. At first, they thought it was just a version of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were understood by Champollion earlier in that century.

But experts couldn’t find a connection between the Phoenician writing and Egyptian writing, or with other writing styles like hieratic or cuneiform. Ideas about how it started included thinking one person made it up, or that a group called the Hyksos changed Egyptian writing to make it. Eventually, it was learned that the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet was based on ideas from Egyptian writing.

Table of letters

The chart shows how the Phoenician letter shapes changed into other alphabets over time. The sounds these letters made also changed, both when new alphabets were first created and through slow changes in how people said words.

When people first started using alphabetic writing with the early Greek alphabet, the letters looked similar to Phoenician ones but were not exactly the same. Vowels were also added to the Phoenician letters, which only had consonants. There were different versions of the writing system in various parts of Greece, especially in how they used Phoenician letters that did not match Greek sounds exactly. The Ionic variant became the standard Greek alphabet, and the Cumae variant led to the Italic alphabets, including the Latin alphabet.

The Runic alphabet comes from Italic, and the Cyrillic alphabet comes from medieval Greek. The Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic scripts come from Aramaic. Ge'ez comes from South Arabian.

Letter names

The Phoenicians named their letters using a special method called acrophony. They picked a word that started with the sound they wanted for each letter and used that word's name as the letter's name. For example, the second letter came from an Egyptian picture of a house. In Phoenician, "house" is bet, so that letter was called bet and made the sound b.

Some letter names changed over time. For instance, one letter that once meant "throwing stick" later came to mean "camel." The Greeks kept versions of these names, but they didn’t have special meanings. The Latins and Slavs named their letters based only on the sounds, not the old words.

Numerals

The Phoenicians used special symbols to show numbers. They had a simple line for the number 1 and added more lines to make numbers up to 9. For the number 10, they used a horizontal line. They had different shapes for the number 20, and they combined these to make bigger numbers like 100. They could also show numbers like 400 by combining smaller numbers with the symbol for 100. However, they did not have a symbol for zero.

Derived alphabets

Main article: History of the alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet was very important. Many writing systems we use today come from it, and also from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian scripts come from the Greek alphabet, which came from Phoenician. The Aramaic alphabet also came from Phoenician and later became the Arabic and Hebrew scripts. Some people think that scripts from India also come from Aramaic, which would mean most of the world's writing systems share Phoenician roots, but this idea is not proven.

Early Semitic scripts

The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, closely related to Phoenician, was used for early Hebrew. It was slightly different from Phoenician. The Samaritan alphabet came from Paleo-Hebrew in the 6th century BC. The South Arabian script might come from an early form of the Proto-Sinaitic script. The Geʽez script came from South Arabian.

Samaritan alphabet

Main article: Samaritan alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet was still used by the Samaritans and became the Samaritan alphabet. The Samaritans still use this script today for writing Hebrew and Aramaic. The Samaritan script has stayed the same over time and was mainly used for writing books.

Aramaic-derived

Further information: Aramaic alphabet

The Aramaic alphabet, used for writing Aramaic, came from Phoenician. Aramaic was a common language in the Middle East and was used widely. It later split into many alphabets, including Hebrew, Syriac, and Nabataean. Nabataean, in its cursive form, became the ancestor of the Arabic alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet came from the Aramaic alphabet around 300 BC during the Second Temple period. There was also a return to using Phoenician-style writing at that time.

By the 5th century BC, Jews mostly used the Aramaic alphabet instead of Phoenician, as it was the official script in the Persian empire. The "Jewish square-script" we now call the Hebrew alphabet came from Aramaic around the 3rd century BC.

The Kharosthi script, used in the Indo-Greek Kingdom in the 3rd century BC, came from Aramaic. The Syriac alphabet is Aramaic adapted for early Christian use. The Sogdian alphabet came from Syriac and later became the Old Uyghur script.^{[citation needed]} The Manichaean alphabet came from Sogdian.

The Arabic script is a medieval cursive form of Nabataean, which itself came from Aramaic.

Brahmic scripts

See also: Aramaic hypothesis

Some people think that the Brahmi script of India (and related scripts) came from Aramaic, which would make Phoenician the ancestor of almost every alphabet today, except hangul.

We know the Aramaic-derived Kharosthi script was in northern India by the 4th century BC, so people there knew this way of writing. But the connection between Kharosthi and the later Brahmi script is not clear. This idea is still studied, but it has not been proven.

Greek-derived

Further information: History of the Greek alphabet and History of the Latin alphabet

The Greek alphabet came from Phoenician. The Greeks changed the Phoenician letters to fit their own sounds, including vowels, which Phoenician did not use. For example, the Phoenician letter for a sound like "glottal stop" was changed to stand for the vowel "a".

The Alphabets of Asia Minor likely came from older forms of the Greek alphabet.

The Latin alphabet came from Old Italic, which came from a form of the Greek alphabet. The Runic alphabet also has roots in Phoenician, though scholars debate whether it came from Latin, Old Italic, or Greek.

The Coptic alphabet is based mostly on the Greek alphabet, with a few extra letters from Demotic script.

The Cyrillic script came from the later Greek alphabet. Some letters came from Glagolitic forms.

Paleohispanic scripts

Main article: Paleohispanic scripts

These were special writing systems used by ancient peoples in what is now Spain and Portugal. They were deciphered in 1922 by Manuel Gómez-Moreno, but they are hard to understand because they are not related to any languages spoken today. The main script is the Northeastern Iberian script, used for the Iberian language. There were also the Southeastern Iberian script and the Celtiberian script.

Some special features of these scripts include:

• Semi-syllabism. Half of the signs show syllables made of certain consonants (k g b d t) and the other half show simple sounds like vowels (a e i o u) and some other consonants (l n r ŕ s ś).
• Duality. Early signs could change meaning with an extra stroke, like turning ge into ke. Later, this feature was lost.
• Redundancy. In the Southwest script, vowels were repeated after each syllable sign.

Unicode

Main article: Phoenician (Unicode block)

The Phoenician alphabet has its own special section in Unicode, which is a system that helps computers show and use different writing scripts from around the world. This means people can type and see Phoenician letters just like they do with letters from the English alphabet.