What is the importance of the Phoenician alphabet?
A. – The first alphabet: “Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Both were well known in the part of the Middle East that produced the first widely used alphabet, the Phoenician.” Actually, a very recent discovery of cave writings thought to have been done by the ancient Israelites during their 40-year’s exodus from Egypt predate Phoenician writings. It is now thought that the Israelites developed their alphabet from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the Phoenicians copied it. The Greeks are credited with adding vowels (since neither the Hebrew nor Phoenician alphabets had vowels), and the English alphabet was based on the Greek (and later Latin), not the Phoenician. “Most alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development, for example the Greek and Latin alphabets.” —————– EDIT: This is the show where they discussed recent cave findings:
