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The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BC, to become the official script of the Achaemenid Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
World distribution of the Latin alphabet. The blue areas show the countries where the Latin alphabet is the sole official script or most predominant writing system. By the 18th century, the standard Latin alphabet, cemented by the rise of the printing press , comprised the 26 letters we are familiar with today, albeit in Romance languages the ...
The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic, is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off into a number of related alphabets, including Hebrew, Syriac, and Nabataean, the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of the Arabic alphabet.
This places the origin of the artefacts about 500 years before the previously known oldest alphabetic writing. “Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt some ...
Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z. Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-1173-3. Goldwasser, Orly, How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs Archived 2016-06-30 at the Wayback Machine Biblical Archaeology Review 36:02, Mar/Apr 2010. Millard, A. R. (1986) "The Infancy of the Alphabet" World Archaeology. pp. 390–398.
The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the ... it is the most widely used script in the world. [34] The Etruscan alphabet remained nearly unchanged ...
The final consonantal letter of the alphabet, s 2, has a disputed origin along with both "appended" glottals, but "The patent similarity of form between the Ugaritic symbol transliterated [s 2], and the s-character of the later Northwest Semitic script makes a common origin likely, but the reason for the addition of this sign to the Ugaritic ...
The Phoenician alphabet is the continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet into the Iron Age; it in turn gave rise to the Aramaic and Greek alphabets. To date, most of the writing systems used throughout Afro-Eurasia descend from either Aramaic or Greek. The Greek alphabet was the first to introduce letters representing vowel sounds. [56]