Learn about the Phoenician language and the Phoenician writing system. Discover who created the first alphabet. Learn the importance of the Phoenician alphabet.
Updated: 11/21/2023
Phoenician Alphabet | Language, Writing System & Legacy
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who created the Phoenician alphabet?
The ancient Phoenician civilization created the Phoenician alphabet. They used an earlier version from the Pro-Canaanites and adapted it into a written alphabet.
What is the first alphabet?
There are earlier writing systems such as Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics, however the first known letter system of an alphabet is thought to have originated from the Pro-Canaanites. The Phoenicians adopted this base system and adapted into a written language version.
Why is the Phoenician alphabet important?
The Phoenician alphabet is important because it connected the spoken language to the written language. This created a more universal way of communication. Other written languages also derived from the Phoenician alphabet.
Table of Contents
ShowThe Phoenician Alphabet was an early form of writing developed by the ancient Phoenician civilization and is one of the first known modern alphabets. The Phoenician communities developed along the Mediterranean Sea around 1500 B.C.E. The Phoenician writing system is a consonantal alphabet of symbols standing for sounds. The Phoenician alphabet was developed by the Phoenician Prince Cadmus to improve communication in order to more easily facilitate trade with other surrounding cultures. The alphabet of the Phoenicians greatly influenced many written languages of today, including Greek and Latin.
Although early civilizations such as the Sumerians and Egyptians did have a form of writing, they were not considered an 'alphabet'. These earlier languages of the Sumerians and Egyptians used symbols or pictures to represent words or phrases. This Phoenician version of the alphabet had symbols creating different sounds, rather than words, which allowed for a more universal way of communication.
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Phoenicians and the Phoenician Language
The Phoenicians prospered along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea as far back as 1500 B.C.E. until 300 B.C.E., and were known as great traders who sailed across the Mediterranean to make transactions with many other civilizations exchanging goods and supplies. The Phoenicians spoke a form of ancient Semitic language of the Pro-Canaanites, closely related to the Hebrew language. Although it is not known exactly where the first alphabet originated, the Phoenicians are attributed to developing the first matured alphabet that created a connection between written and spoken language. Evidence of the Phoenician alphabet was first found in the city of Byblos, along the Mediterranean, and is thought to have been influenced first by the Egyptian form of picture writing called Hieroglyphics, and also the ancient Sumerian cuneiform writing, compromised of wedge-shaped symbols.
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The Phoenician alphabet was a significant contribution of the Phoenician culture because it was the first to connect the written language to the spoken language. By developing symbols that stood for sounds instead of phrases, readers of the Phoenician writing system could sound out words. This alphabet essentially became the base of the phonetic system, named for the Phoenicians, that is used today when teaching reading and writing. The Phoenician version of the alphabet gave way to almost all succinct written languages.
Who Invented the First Alphabet?
The original form of the alphabet is thought to have originated from an ancient Semitic tribe near Egypt sometime between 1850 B.C.E and 1700 B.C.E. This tribe is thought to have created the first alphabet using the idea of writing from the Egyptian hieroglyph system, but created their own system of symbols. The main change in the system was creating a set of sounds instead of sets of words. The Proto-Canaanite civilization then adopted this system, creating the oldest matured alphabet that the Phoenicians then used to create a newer system. The Phoenician's adaption became the most significant version that later influenced almost all subsequent written languages, such as Greek and Latin. Other writing systems that preceded the Phoenicians included Cuneiform, a wedge-shaped set of symbol writing from the Sumerians, and Hieroglyphics, a system of picture writing, from the Egyptians. Both of these earlier systems focused on creating words and phrases, rather than individual letters.
The Legacy of the Phoenician Alphabet
The Greeks were one of the first to adopt the Phoenician alphabet and developed it into a root alphabet for many other languages such as Latin. The western alphabet used today for the English language eventually evolved from the Greek and Latin adaptations, which ultimately means the English written language also derived from the Phoenicians. The Greeks kept the 22 original letters from the Phoenicians but added in 4 more letters to create vowel sounds, thus the current day 26 letter alphabet of the western world. The Phoenicians also developed a written number system.
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The ancient Phoenician alphabet was written from right to left and consisted of 22 symbols. Each symbol stood for a consonant sound, which allowed readers to sound out each letter to create words.
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Features of the Phoenician Alphabet
There are very unique characteristics of the Phoenician Alphabet to note such as:
- Contains 22 letters total
- Symbols stood for sounds rather than words or phrases
- Contains only consonants, no vowels, and is referred to as a consonantal alphabet
- Written from right to left, like Hebrew or Arabic
- Most alphabets are thought to have derived from the Phoenician alphabet
- Considered the root of the western alphabet
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The Phoenician writing system derives from an ancient Semitic civilization that is accredited to developing the most significant early form of alphabet. The Phoenicians, the creators of the Phoenician Alphabet, thrived along the coasts of the Mediterranean sea, trading with neighboring civilizations such as the Sumerians and Egyptians. The writing systems at that time included Cuneiform from the Sumerians, and Hieroglyphics from the Egyptians, which both used pictures or symbols to represent words and phrases. The Phoenicians borrowed an earlier, base alphabet system from another neighboring civilization, the Proto-Canaanites, and adapted it into the Phoenician alphabet. The major influence of this new adaptation is that the symbols, or letters, now stood for sounds instead of words or phrases. This led the way to the written language having a connection with the spoken language.
The Phoenician alphabet greatly changed communication between different cultures and continued to influence the development of many following languages such as Greek, and Latin. The Greeks adopted the use of the Phoenician alphabet but changed it from a consonantal alphabet system by adding in vowel sounds. The English language then developed from the 26 letter Geek alphabet, which shows how the Phoenician Alphabet had a vast influence not only across cultures and regions, but also across time.
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The Phoenician Alphabet
As children, one of the first things we learn is the alphabet. This is an important thing to learn, since our entire written language is based around the combinations of letters in the alphabet. Every letter represents a sound in the spoken language, which lets us create words through combinations of sounds. This system is much more efficient than a written language in which each symbol represents an entire word, so it's pretty cool. But where did it come from? The alphabet, as we know it, developed over thousands of years, but originated from the written language known as Phoenician. The Phoenician alphabet was one of the first widely used alphabets in the world. Maybe our children should be singing catchy mnemonic tunes about this alphabet as well.
Origins
To understand the Phoenician alphabet, we first need to understand the Phoenician people. For that, we have to travel back to roughly 1500 BCE on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea around present day Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. This territory was known to the Egyptians as Put, to the people of the eastern Mediterranean as Canaan, and to the ancient Greeks as Phoenicia. The Phoenicians lived in trade-based city-states along the eastern Mediterranean, but also had colonies across the North African coast and some in Southern Europe.
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The Phoenician people spoke the Phoenician language, which was a member of the Northern Semitic group of languages, a common ancestor of many languages spoken in the Middle East to this day. The Mediterranean world around this time was an interesting place. It was here that the world's first cities appeared, here that agriculture was first perfected, and here that people first learned to turn their spoken language into a written language. That first written language (developed around 3500 BCE) was called cuneiform, and it was based on the language of the Mesopotamians. Cuneiform, like many other early written languages, used symbolic characters to represent the sounds of entire syllables.
Over time, people tweaked this system to make it more efficient. They realized that they could drastically reduce the number of characters in the alphabet if they used symbols to represent individual sounds rather than entire syllables. That system, in which characters represent individual sounds, is how we formally define an alphabet. The Proto-Canaanite alphabet was one of the first major attempts to do this, but the Phoenicians took this one step further. They standardized an alphabet of major sounds and developed one of the most efficient and easy-to-use written languages in the world at that time. In fact, while cuneiform contained nearly 1,000 characters, the written Phoenician language contained only 22.
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Structure
The Phoenician language is based around an alphabet of 22 letters, each one representing a sound in the Phoenician language. However, not all of the sounds in the language are actually represented. Phoenician is a consonantal alphabet, which means that it only has letters to represent the consonants. There are no vowels in the Phoenician written language. Readers would simply imply the presence of the vowel sounds based on their knowledge of the written and spoken language. Written Phoenician is composed of these consonantal letters, written from right to left across clay tablets or pieces of early parchment.
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Significance
The oldest piece of Phoenician writing that we've discovered was from the Phoenician city of Byblos (today in Lebanon) dating to the 11th century BCE. From there, however, Phoenician began to appear in more and more cities around the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians were a maritime people, who built up a society of traders who shipped products to and from the various cities along the Mediterranean coast. As they built up their trade networks, they established colonies across Northern Africa and the Middle East, and even some in Southern Europe.
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Wherever they went, the Phoenicians brought their written language with them. Eventually, the Phoenicians became some of the most respected traders in the Mediterranean and were welcomed into ports around the entire region. As a result, their language became the de facto language of merchants, and the Phoenician script found its way to societies in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. From Egypt to Greece and even as far as Spain, Mediterranean societies began using forms of the efficient Phoenician script to write their own languages. In fact, the Hebrew, Arabic, and possibly even Indian alphabets were originally based on the Phoenician alphabet. In addition, the Greeks based their alphabet on this system, eventually leading to the Etruscan and Latin alphabets and the rest of the written languages of Europe. The Phoenician alphabet was behind it all.
Lesson Summary
The Phoenicians were a maritime people of the eastern Mediterranean, roughly where Lebanon is today. They spoke a Northern Semitic language and adapted the Proto-Canaanite alphabet into one that was much more efficient. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, but only represented the sounds for consonants, making it a consonantal alphabet. This practical writing system was used in Phoenician ports around the Mediterranean, eventually becoming the de facto language of trade. As a result, other societies adopted the Phoenician alphabet, using it to write out their own languages. We see this with the alphabets of the Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin languages which are all based on the original Phoenician alphabet. So, the next time you hear a child practicing their 26-letter alphabet song, remind them that it could have been a song for over 1000 characters. Our alphabet is pretty simple, and we can thank the Phoenicians for that.
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Phoenician Alphabet | Language, Writing System & Legacy
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