The Phoenician Alphabet

c. 1050 BCE — Levant, Phoenicia

Today: Lebanon (the ports of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos)

Phoenician merchants along the Lebanese coast needed to write quickly, so they used a script of about 22 signs, each standing for a sound rather than a word or syllable. Cuneiform and hieroglyphs required years of training and a professional scribal class; an alphabet could be learned in weeks by an ordinary trader. Carried on Phoenician ships across the Mediterranean, it was adapted by the Greeks, who added vowels, and from them by the Romans. Writing stopped being the property of a priesthood and became something a merchant, a soldier, or eventually anyone could own.

Worth knowing: Almost every alphabet in use today — Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, and the scripts of India — descends from this one merchant shorthand. The letter A began as an upside-down ox head; 'aleph' meant ox.

Pattern: Information-medium revolution — A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Entry 24 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.