Despite their great exploits as seafarers, the most important legacy that the Phoenicians left is their alphabet. The earliest writing systems consisted of pic-tographs (hieroglyphs), simple pictures that represented objects or ideas. The beginning of a true alphabet occurs when a pictograph comes to represent part of the sound of a word, rather than the idea behind it.
The Phoenician settlements on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean were surrounded by four major cultures, each of which had its own script. To the north were the Hittites, who used a hieroglyphic script of such complexity that it
The remains of the forum at Carthage. Founded by exiles from Tyre, Carthage rose to become one of the western Mediterranean’s most powerful city-states.
Has still not been completely deciphered. To the east, the Mesopotamians had a cuneiform script that used symbols for the different syllables of a word. The Cretans and Mycenaeans to the west had two systems of writing (called Linear A and Linear B), as well as symbols to represent syllables. To the south, the Egyptians originally used hieroglyphs, but in the second millennium BCE, a script called the sacerdotal was developed. This script drew the hieroglyphs in an abbreviated form, in much the same way that a modern stenographer writes the alphabet in short form. The sacerdotal script bore some similarity to an alphabetical script but contained as many symbols as the hieroglyphic script. All of these writing systems used hundreds of different symbols and could not be called an alphabet in the modern sense of the word.
The first true alphabet, called North Semitic, originated on the eastern Mediterranean shore between 1700 and 1500 BCE and consisted of signs representing consonants, as do today’s related Hebrew and Arabic variants. Other branches, including the Phoenician, developed from the original Semitic alphabet in the 11th century BCE.
The Phoenician script came to light in 1876, when a Syrian farmer turned up copper beakers bearing inscriptions from the time of King Hiram of Tyre, who ruled around 950 BCE. The farmer broke the beakers to sell the metal, and only a few fragments with inscriptions were recovered. The writing on those fragments is the known Semitic script and reads fTom right to left.
More finds were made in 1922, when a number of royal tombs were excavated
This colonnade is found in Tyre, which was one of the richest and most powerful of the Phoenician city-states. It was located in present-day Lebanon.
World History
