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The Phoenician alphabet [b] is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) [2] used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region.
He is the fifth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician hē 𐤄, Hebrew hē ה , Aramaic hē 𐡄, Syriac hē ܗ, and Arabic hāʾ ه . Its sound value is the voiceless glottal fricative ( [h] ).
He rose to power in 858 BC and began a series of campaigns against neighboring states. Although he did not invade Phoenicia and maintained good relations with the Phoenician cities, [62] he demanded tribute from the "kings of the seacoast", a group which probably included the Phoenician city-states. [63]
Herodotus believed that the Phoenicians originated from Bahrain, [16] [17] a view shared centuries later by the historian Strabo. [18] This theory was accepted by the 19th-century German classicist Arnold Heeren, who noted that Greek geographers described "two islands, named Tyrus or Tylos, and Aradus, which boasted that they were the mother country of the Phoenicians, and exhibited relics of ...
The Ship Sarcophagus: a Phoenician ship carved on a sarcophagus, 2nd century AD.. The theory of Phoenician discovery of the Americas suggests that the earliest Old World contact with the Americas was not with Columbus or Norse settlers, but with the Phoenicians (or, alternatively, other Semitic peoples) in the first millennium BC.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek eta Η, Etruscan, Latin H, and Cyrillic И. While H is a consonant in the Latin alphabet, the Greek and Cyrillic equivalents represent vowel sounds, though the letter was originally a consonant in Greek and this usage later evolved into the rough breathing character. [ 1 ]
Phoenician hē had been used as a mater lectionis for both [a] and [e] in addition to [h], but in Greek it was restricted to [e], following the acrophonic principle; its value [a] was instead written with the letter ʼāleph, while Greek [h] was written with ḥeth. All Phoenician letters had been acrophonic, and they remained so in Greek.
Phoenician (/ f ə ˈ n iː ʃ ən / fə-NEE-shən; Phoenician: śpt knʿn lit. ' language of Canaan ' [ 2 ] ) is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon .