History of Alphabet

The history of Alphabet started in ancient Egypt. The first pure alphabets map single symbols to single phonemes but not each phoneme to a symbol. They emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, but then the alphabetic principles had already been invested into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium, which were a representation of language developed by Semetic workers in Egypt. Other alphabets around the world nowadays either descended from this one discovery or were inspired by its design, including the Phoenician alphabet and the Greek alphabet.

Egyptian Alphabet

The Proto-Canaanite alphabet, known as the Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants. These were called abjad. This can be traced nearly all the alphabets ever used. Most of them were descended from the Phoenician version of the script. The Aramaic alphabet evolved from the Phoenician version of the script. The Aramaic alphabet evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BC as the official script of the Persian Empire. It appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia.

Proto-Canaanite Alphabet

The Phaistos Disk

It is a curious archaeological find, likely going back to the late Minoan Bronze Age. The purpose, meaning and its original geographical place of manufacture making it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology. There is a small number of comparable symbols known from other Cretan inscriptions, known as Cretan hieroglyphs. There are a total of 241 tokens on the disc and 45 unique signs. These signs represent easily identifiable every-day things. The Phaistos Disk captured the imagination of amateur archaeologists. Almost everything has been proposed, including prayers, narrative or an adventure story, a call to arms, a board game and a geometric theorem.

Phaistos Disk

The Phoenician Alphabet continues with the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention called Phoenician from the mid 11th century. The Phoenician are descendants of the Bronze Age Canaanites who were presented by the Lebanon mountains by the sea and did not succumb to the Israelites or the 'sea people'. When they first appeared in western historiography, the Phoenicians already possess scores of colonies all around the Mediterranean and have extensive trade networks, extending as far as the Atlantic coast of Africa and the Black Sea, from which they challenged the Greeks and later the Romans for supremacy of the seas. Their artisans and artists were unparalleled, they were sponsoring together with King Solomon, ambitious naval undertakings. It was based on the principle that one sign represents one spoken sound.

Phoenician Alphabet

Besides Aramaic, the Phoenician Alphabet gave rise to the Greek and Berber alphabets. Separate letters for vowels would have actually blocked the legibility of Egyptian, Berber or Semitic, their absence was problematic for Greek, which had a very different morphological structure. All names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants and these consonants were what the letters represented. Some of them were unpronounceable by the Greeks thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. The Phoenician letter 'alep' became the Greek 'alpha'. This development only provided for six of the twelve Greek vowels. Greeks created digraphs and other modifications such as ei, ou and o (omega).

Aramaic Alphabet

The Greeks

Greek Alphabet is the source for all the modern scripts of Europe. History of the Greek starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms and continues to the present day. Consequently, the Greek alphabet can be considered to be the world's first true alphabet. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, "eta" stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagotitics, Cyrilic, Armenian, Gothic (Roman and Greek letters) and Georgian.

Greek Alphabet

The Romans

Hundreds of years later, the Romans used the Greek alphabet as the basis for the uppercase alphabet that we know today. They refined the art of handwriting, fashioning several distinctive styles of lettering which they used for different purposes. They ascribed a rigid, formal script for important manuscripts and official documents and a quicker, more informal style for letters and routine types of writing. Serif's originated with the carving of words into stone in ancient Italy. Roman stonemasons started adding little hooks to the tips of letters to prevent the chisel from slipping, which turned out to be the very aesthetic as well as legibility increasing addition to type that we use to this day.

Roman Alphabet

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