The developers of the first true alphabet were the
Phoenicians. The Phoenicians originate from the coast of the Mediterranean,
in what is now Lebanon.
They were a trading and seafaring culture, and had contact with both the
Egyptians and the Sumerians.
The Sumerians had originally developed their
writing system in order to make trading easier, and so it would be with the
Phoenicians. However, the system of writing developed by the Phoenicians would
be very different than that created by either the Egyptians or the Sumerians.
The Phoenicians had closer contact with the
Egyptians than with the Sumerians. For much of their history they were at times
under Egyptian control. Their writing symbols developed somewhat from Egyptian
hieroglyphs. The Phoenician symbols did not represent entire words, though, but
rather single syllables.
Having forms that represent a single syllable allow
for much more freedom in writing with far fewer symbols. It also allows for the
easier writing of words in other languages, because the writing is based on
sounds rather than what the word actually means. Any new word that you come
across can easily be adapted to writing based on the sound of the word.
The Phoenician alphabet took several centuries to
develop, but had been fairly well completed by about 1000 BC, over 2000 years
after the development of the first writing system in Sumeria.
The original Phoenician alphabet consisted of 22
letters, none of which were vowels. Other alphabets such as the Hebrew alphabet
would not contain vowels. While many of the symbols have great similarity to
our own letters, they often represented very different sounds. For example,
there is a letter which looks like an x, but rather represents the “taw”
sound.”
The Phoenicians were the major traders on the Mediterranean,
and they took their alphabet with them as they traded. Many different cultures
began to pick up their alphabet, and modify it to their own uses. The most
important of these cultures in the ultimate development of our own alphabet
were the Greeks. However, there are still remnants of its Phoenician origin in
our own language, as we still call the study of how letters actually sound
“phonetics.”