The Alphabet — Gift to All Languages

Every letter you are reading right now is a Phoenician invention. The Phoenicians developed the first phonemic alphabet around 1050 BCE — twenty-two consonant symbols that could be combined to write any word in any language, rather than the thousands of logograms required by Egyptian hieroglyphics or Mesopotamian cuneiform. It spread to the Greeks, who added vowels. The Greeks passed it to the Romans. The Romans spread it to Europe. The Arabs adapted it and spread it eastward. Today, the vast majority of writing systems used on earth trace their ancestry to those twenty-two letters carved by Phoenician merchants who needed a faster way to keep accounts.

These signs carry the original Phoenician letters, the merchant's clay tablet, and the inheritance that made literacy possible for the world.