How did the Phoenicians create the first alphabet and what caused them to

do so?
Kaytlin Dumler
WHH 2
May 18th 2015
Historical question essay
Grading period 3

The Phoenicians have been credited for many amazing things thorough
history and the alphabet being one of the greatest. The Phoenician alphabet
developed from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, during the 15th century, B.C.
Before then the Phoenicians wrote with a cuneiform script. The earliest
known inscriptions in the Phoenician alphabet come from Byblos and date
back to 1000 B.C.

Phoenicia is the name of those city-states that grew on the eastern

shore of the Mediterranean Sea and were identified as centers of trade in
ancient times. Families began to inhabit the land around Byblos predicted
6000 B.C. The Phoenicians were peaceful people who seemed to like
navigation and trade, and beginning of about 3200 B.C, they were the first to
explore the Mediterranean Sea in boats made of cedar. They were protected
by the mountains of Lebanon from civilizations that were fighting.

How did the Phoenicians create the first alphabet and what caused them to
do so?
The alphabet was created for trading and recording purposes, which
allowed it to grow and spread rapidly. The tablets and coins that had the first
pieces of writing were traded through Europe, Asia, and Africa. It had 22
symbols and written right to left.

The Phoenician alphabet is thought to be the first alphabetic script to

be widely used the Phoenicians traded around the Mediterranean and even
beyond, and set up cities and colonies in parts of southern Europe and North
Africa, and the origins of most alphabetic writing systems can be traced back
to the Phoenician alphabet, including Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Arabic and
Hebrew, and also the scripts of India and East Asia.

The Phoenician script is an important beginning in the alphabet tree,

and many modern scripts can be traced through it. Arabic, Hebrew, Latin,
and Greek scripts are all descended from Phoenician. Vowels are generally
omitted in this phase of the writing system. And the symbols represented
vowels. The major change between Proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician is
graphical. The Phoenician letter shapes grew to be more abstract and linear,
in comparison to the more "pictographic" shapes. The Phoenician alphabet is
credited for our very own that we use today.

How did the Phoenicians create the first alphabet and what caused them to
do so?