Credited to Lebanon. The script developed out of the North Semitic alphabet and continues earlier Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite writing attested in Sinai and Canaan. Byblos is where the earliest surviving inscriptions in its developed form were found, and the dating of the Ahiram epitaph is itself debated.
How it began
The Phoenician alphabet developed out of the North Semitic alphabet. The earliest surviving Phoenician inscription is the epitaph on the sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos, on the coast of present-day Lebanon, which Britannica dates to the 11th century BCE. Britannica states that the alphabet was developed at Byblos, where almost all the known early Phoenician inscriptions were found, most from the 10th century BCE. UNESCO ties Byblos directly to the history and diffusion of the script, citing the inscriptions of Ahiram, Yehimilk, Elibaal and Shaphatbaal. Ancient Phoenicia occupied the territory of modern Lebanon.
Before it existed
The other scripts of the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, used many complex characters and took long professional training to master, which kept literacy within a small elite. The earliest proto-alphabetic writing, called Proto-Sinaitic, is attested here and there in the Sinai Peninsula and in Canaan in the Bronze Age. At Byblos an older local script, the still undeciphered Byblos syllabary, was in use, and Phoenician letters were sometimes cut over erased texts written in it.
How it works
The alphabet has 22 letters, all of them consonants, and is written from right to left. It was the first script to have a fixed writing direction. Each symbol stands for one sound, so a reader has only a couple of dozen signs to learn. Because the letters were first incised with a stylus, their forms are mostly angular and straight. Its sound values stayed unchanged from the North Semitic script.
How it spread
Phoenician traders carried the alphabet across the Mediterranean. Colonial variants include Cypro-Phoenician from the 10th century BCE, a Sardinian form from about the 9th century, and the Punic and neo-Punic scripts of Carthage. From the 9th century BCE adaptations multiplied, among them the Greek, Old Italic and Anatolian scripts. In Phoenicia itself the alphabet stayed in use until about the 1st century BCE, and Punic forms were written until about the 3rd century CE.
What lasted
The Phoenician alphabet is the probable ancestor of the Greek alphabet and through it of all Western alphabets. Its simplicity let ordinary people learn to write and weakened the monopoly of scribes. Jean-Jacques Barthelemy deciphered it in 1758. In 2005 UNESCO accepted the alphabet into its Memory of the World Register, on the basis of inscribed objects held in the National Museum of Beirut, of which the Ahiram sarcophagus is the oldest.
