History of the Alphabet
The rest of the letters of the new alphabet also came from pictures, not all of them originally Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Why did people want to punch Socrates?
Where did Egyptians bury your liver?
How old are the Rocky Mountains?
What does a half-timbered house look like?
How do you spin wool?
(a project)
For five hundred years, although traders continued to use this simpler alphabet, the official scribes kept right on writing in hieroglyphs (in Egypt) and in cuneiform (in West Asia). But about 1200 BC, as the New Kingdom fell apart in Egypt and all of the Eastern Mediterranean entered a Dark Age, there were no more professional scribes. Without experts to write for them, the people living in the new small kingdoms of the early Iron Age - especially Israel and Phoenicia - were happy to find a way of writing that they could do themselves. That's when the alphabet began to really catch on.
About 800 BC, Phoenician traders brought the alphabet to North Africa and Greece, and soon after that Greek traders brought it to northern Italy, where both the Romans and the Etruscans began to use it too. In Egypt and West Asia, it took longer, but even in Egypt most people were using alphabetic writing (based on the Greek alphabet) by the late Roman period, about 300 AD.
This early alphabet is the basis for not only the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets, but also the Arabic alphabet, which gradually developed out of the Hebrew alphabet.
Page one about the alphabet
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