2764: The Impact of The Phoenician Script Jul 15, 2024

The Phoenician script, emerging around 1050 BCE, is widely acknowledged as the progenitor of nearly all modern alphabets. Its simplicity and adaptability set the foundation for its proliferation, fundamentally transforming global communication.

The Greeks were among the first to adapt the Phoenician script, around the 8th century BC, creating the Greek alphabet. This innovation introduced vowels, a significant departure from the purely consonantal Phoenician system. The Greek alphabet subsequently gave rise to two of the most influential writing systems in the Western world: the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. The Latin script, evolving in the Roman Empire, is now the foundation for most Western European languages. The Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th century AD, became the writing system for many Slavic languages, including Russian and Bulgarian.

The Phoenician script’s impact wasn't confined to the West, nor the South with writing systems like Arabic and its many offshoots; it also reached South Asia, where it influenced the creation of the Brahmi script. Brahmi, appearing around the 3rd century BC, is the ancestor of numerous scripts used across South and Southeast Asia today, including Devanagari (used for Hindi and Sanskrit), Tamil, and Burmese. These, notably, use lots more curling letters, reflecting a change of writing materials, here onto leaves instead of flat papyrus or parchment. 

However, not all scripts derive from Phoenician. The Chinese script, for instance, developed independently around 1200 BCE and is based on logograms rather than an alphabet, and Korean also developed independently, though it is not ancient. Similarly, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which predate Phoenician, used a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements. In fact, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, there were actually numerous other writing systems like Cuneiform, Cypriot, and Linear A that also emerged independently and the ceased to be used.