What civilization developed the Phoenician alphabet?
The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to begin with a cut-off date of 1050 BC. It was used by the Phoenicians to write Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. Modern alphabets thought to have descended from Phoenician include Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet), Tifinagh (via the Lybian alphabet) and Hebrew (via Aramaic). Like Proto-Canaanite, Arabic and Proto-Hebrew, Phoenician is a consonantal alphabet (an abjad), and contains no symbols for vowel sounds, which had to be deduced from context. The Phoenician alphabet is similar to the Greek alphabet in many ways. (The Greek was the first alphabet to include vowels.) Phoenician inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos (in present-day Lebanon) and Carthage in North Africa. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt [1]. The ori
