Exploration, trade, and craftsmanship were not the Phoenicians' only achievements. Perhaps the greatest of all their contributions to civilization was the development of the alphabet. Though the Phoenicians did not claim to have invented the alphabet they used, they certainly developed it, and through their many voyages extended it to the known world. The Phoenician alphabet, which appeared between 1700 and 1500 b. c., originally used only nineteen symbols, roughly equivalent to the letters of the English alphabet, except for I and the last six letters, U through Z.
Before the alphabet, all writing had been in the form of pictograms, symbols that looked like the thing they represented, or phonograms, symbols that represented a syllable. To use hieroglyphics, as the Egyptians did, or cuneiform as did the people of Mesopotamia, one had to memorize hundreds of symbols. Therefore only scribes, highly learned men trained in the use of pictograms and phonograms, were literate (LIT-uh-ret)—that is, able to read and write.
Table comparing the Greek, Hieratic Greek, and Phoenician alphabets.
Corbis. Reproduced by permission.
After the development of the alphabet, the next great advance in expanding people's ability to read and write did not come until about a. d.
1450, when the invention of the printing press made it possible to spread the written word throughout the world.
The first book printed was the Bible. It is no mistake, perhaps, that the word Bible, which is Greek for “book,” comes from the name of the Phoenician city-state of Byblos.
World History
