The Phoenician alphabet proper uses 22consonant letters—as an abjad used to write a Semitic language, it leaves vowel sounds implicit—though late varieties sometimes usedmatres lectionis to denote somevowels. As its letters were originally incised using astylus, their forms are mostly angular and straight, though cursive forms increased in use over time, culminating in theNeo-Punic alphabet used inRoman North Africa.
Study of Phoenician medals, byJean-Jacques BarthélemyPhotograph of section of theZayit Stone, 10th century BC: (right-to-left) the letters waw, he, het, zayin, tet (𐤅𐤄𐤇𐤆𐤈)
Another early West Semitic writing system that is sometimes brought into discussions of the background to the Phoenician alphabet is theByblos syllabary, or “Byblian pseudo-hieroglyphic” script. It is an undeciphered corpus of roughly fourteen to fifteen short inscriptions, almost all found atByblos and first excavated between 1928 and 1932 by Maurice Dunand, who published the editio princeps and first sign-list in hisByblia grammata (1945).[9][10][11]
The inscriptions are engraved on bronze tablets and “spatulas” as well as on stone stelae and fragments, using a signary of around one hundred distinct characters.[9][10] Dunand’s inventory counted 102–114 signs, but later work suggests that damaged signs and graphic variants inflate this figure and that the functional repertoire was probably closer to ninety, a size more compatible with a mainly syllabic script than with a simple alphabetic one.[11][12] The system is therefore usually classified as a syllabary (or more cautiously as a logo-syllabic system), probably devised to record a Northwest Semitic language local to Byblos, although the underlying language has not been securely identified.[10][11]
Many signs in the Byblos corpus resemble stylised Egyptian hieroglyphs, but palaeographic study shows that several correspond more closely to Old Kingdomhieratic than to monumental hieroglyphs, supporting the view that the script was created in an environment of sustained Egyptian cultural influence at Byblos.[13][11] At the same time, a number of signs have been compared to the shapes of later Phoenician letters, and some scholars have argued that the Byblos script stands somewhere on the continuum between Egyptian-derived logo-syllabic writing and the consonantal alphabets of the early Iron Age Levant.[14][15] Colless, for example, has proposed that as many as eighteen of the twenty-two letters of the later Phoenician alphabet have plausible formal counterparts in the Byblian signary, though this reconstruction is not widely accepted outside a minority of specialists.[14][11]
The chronology of the Byblos syllabary remains controversial. Dunand’s original dating, followed by much of the older literature, placed the inscriptions in the Middle Bronze Age (roughly the nineteenth to seventeenth centuries BC).[9][11] Later studies, including James Hoch’s comparison with hieratic and reassessments of the stratigraphy at Byblos, have allowed for an even earlier development of some sign forms, possibly as early as the transition from the Old to Middle Kingdom in Egypt.[13][11] In contrast, a detailed review by Benjamin Sass argues that the pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions may in fact belong to the early first millennium BC, overlapping with the earliest monumental “Phoenician” inscriptions from Byblos, on the basis of shared sign forms, word dividers and object types (especially the inscribed spatulas).[16] As a result, current scholarship usually treats the dating as open, with scenarios ranging from a local Middle Bronze Age syllabary to a script that remained in restricted use alongside an already-developed linear alphabet in Iron Age Byblos.[10][11][16]
Because the script remains undeciphered, its exact relationship to the Phoenician alphabet is debated. Most overviews of the history of writing in the Levant still regard Proto-Sinaitic and related early alphabetic experiments as the closest direct ancestors of the Phoenician consonantal script, and treat the Byblos syllabary instead as evidence for a parallel, locally specific attempt to adapt Egyptian models to Semitic speech.[17][11][10] A more maximalist view, represented above all by Colless, sees the Byblos signary as a major stepping-stone in the evolution of the alphabet, with the proto-alphabet emerging as a structural simplification of a pre-existing syllabary; other scholars have criticised this as relying on a limited and subjective set of sign correspondences.[14][15][16]
The corpus has attracted numerous decipherment attempts, beginning with proposals by Hrozný and Dhorme in the 1940s and continuing with more elaborate theories by George E. Mendenhall, Jan Best, F. C. Woudhuizen, Giovanni Garbini and others.[10][11][18][19][20][12] Mendenhall treats the script as a Northwest Semitic syllabary with around ninety signs and reads the longest texts as legal documents; Best links parts of the signary toLinear A; Garbini proposes readings that produce, among other things, a medical text; and Colless combines Mendenhall’s sign values with his own model of a “Canaanite syllabary”.[18][19][14][12] Syntheses by Merlo and by Vita and Zamora emphasise that, despite this large literature, there is still no decipherment that commands broad scholarly consensus, and that the small size and uncertain dating of the corpus impose strict limits on what can presently be claimed.[10][11]
Whatever its precise date and internal structure, the Byblos syllabary is usually taken as evidence that centres like Byblos experimented with locally devised linear scripts drawing on Egyptian models before, during or alongside the spread of the early alphabet. In that sense it forms part of the wider cultural and scribal milieu out of which the Phoenician consonantal alphabet emerged, even if it cannot yet be shown to be a direct ancestor of it.[11][16][17] Later philological work on the Phoenician alphabet’s acrophonic letter-names - such as Max Freedom Pollard’s study of the “camel” and the “eye of the needle” as letter-names in the New Testament metaphor - illustrates how those Phoenician names continued to invite reinterpretation in religious and literary traditions, but this line of research concerns the reception of the alphabet rather than the undeciphered syllabic texts from Byblos themselves.[21]
Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet thrived, includingGreek,Old Italic andAnatolian scripts. The alphabet's attractive innovation was its phonetic nature, in whichone sound was represented by one symbol, which meant only a few dozen symbols to learn. The other scripts of the time,cuneiform andEgyptian hieroglyphs, employed many complexcharacters and required long professional training to achieve proficiency;[22] which had restricted literacy to a small elite.
Another reason for its success was the maritime trading culture of Phoenician merchants, which spread the alphabet into parts of North Africa and Southern Europe.[23] Phoenician inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such asByblos (in present-dayLebanon) andCarthage in North Africa. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt.[24]
The alphabet had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. Its simplicity not only allowed its easy adaptation to multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of literacy as an exclusive achievement of royal and religious elites,scribes who used their monopoly on information to control the common population.[25] The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms, such asAssyria,Babylonia andAdiabene, would continue to usecuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the Common Era.
According toHerodotus,[26] the Phoenician princeCadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet—phoinikeia grammata 'Phoenician letters'—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form theirGreek alphabet. Herodotus claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus. He estimates that Cadmus lived 1600 years before his time, while the historical adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks was barely 350 years before Herodotus.[27]
The conventional date of 1050 BC for the emergence of the Phoenician script was chosen because there is a gap in the epigraphic record; there are not actually any Phoenician inscriptions securely dated to the 11th century.[29] The oldest inscriptions are dated to the 10th century.
TheGeneral Directorate of Antiquities of Lebanon has assembled a list of inscribed objects from different time periods that together illustrate the evolution of the Phoenician alphabet. The objects are Lebanese state property and displayed in theNational Museum of Beirut, with occasional loans to other institutions. The oldest of them is the Ahiram sarcophagus.[30] This collection formed the basis of a nomination of the Phoenician alphabet to theMemory of the World International Register.UNESCO accepted the nomination in 2005, recognising the alphabet as documentary heritage of global importance.[31]
The Phoenician alphabet was deciphered in 1758 byJean-Jacques Barthélemy, but its relation to the Phoenicians remained unknown until the 19th century. It was at first believed that the script was a direct variation ofEgyptian hieroglyphs,[32] which weredeciphered by Champollion in the early 19th century.
However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor tohieratic or cuneiform. The theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single individual conceiving it, to theHyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian.[33][clarification needed] It was eventually discovered[clarification needed] that the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet was inspired by the model of hieroglyphs.
The chart shows the graphical evolution of Phoenician letter forms into other alphabets. The sound values also changed significantly, both at the initial creation of new alphabets and from gradual pronunciation changes which did not immediately lead to spelling changes.[34] The Phoenician letter forms shown are idealized: actual Phoenician writing is less uniform, with significant variations by era and region.
When alphabetic writing began, with theearly Greek alphabet, the letter forms were similar but not identical to Phoenician, and vowels were added to the consonant-only Phoenician letters. There were also distinctvariants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact match to Greek sounds were used. TheIonic variant evolved into the standard Greek alphabet, and theCumae variant into theItalic alphabets (including theLatin alphabet).
Phoenician used a system ofacrophony to name letters: a word was chosen for each initial consonant sound, and became the name of the letter for that sound. These names were not arbitrary: each Phoenician letter was based on an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an Egyptian word; this word was translated into Phoenician (or a closely related Semitic language), then the initial sound of the translated word became the letter's Phoenician value.[39] For example, the second letter of the Phoenician alphabet was based on the Egyptian hieroglyph for "house" (a sketch of a house); the Semitic word for 'house' wasbet; hence the Phoenician letter was calledbet and had the sound valueb.
According to a 1904 theory byTheodor Nöldeke, some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script.[dubious –discuss] This includes:
gaml 'throwing stick' togimel 'camel'
digg 'fish' todalet 'door'
hll 'jubilation' tohe 'window'
ziqq 'manacle' tozayin 'weapon'
naḥš 'snake' tonun 'fish'
piʾt 'corner' tope 'mouth'
šimš 'sun' tošin 'tooth'
Yigael Yadin (1963) went to great lengths to prove that there was actual battle equipment similar to some of the original letter forms named for weapons (samek, zayin).[40]
Later, the Greeks kept approximations of the Phoenician names, albeit they did not mean anything to them other than the letters themselves; on the other hand, theLatins (and presumably theEtruscans from whom they borrowed a variant of theWestern Greek alphabet) and the Orthodox Slavs (at least when naming theCyrillic letters, which came to them from the Greek by way of theGlagolitic) based their names purely on the letters' sounds.Max Freedom Pollard proposes that some New Testament metaphors, such as the "camel" passing through the "eye of a needle", may be references to the Phoenician letter names "camel" and "eye of the needle."[41]
The Phoenician numeral system consisted of separate symbols for 1, 10, 20, and 100. The sign for 1 was a simple vertical stroke (𐤖). Other numerals up to 9 were formed by adding the appropriate number of such strokes, arranged in groups of three. The symbol for 10 was a horizontal line or tack (𐤗). The sign for 20 (𐤘) could come in different glyph variants, one of them being a combination of two 10-tacks, approximately Z-shaped. Larger multiples of ten were formed by grouping the appropriate number of 20s and 10s. There existed several glyph variants for 100 (𐤙). The 100 symbol could be multiplied by a preceding numeral, e.g. the combination of 4 and 100 yielded 400.[42] The system did not contain a numeralzero.[43]
Each letter of Phoenician gave way to a new form in its daughter scripts. Left to right: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic.
Phoenician was prolific. Many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, so ultimately toEgyptian hieroglyphs. TheLatin,Cyrillic,Armenian andGeorgian scripts are derived from theGreek alphabet, which evolved from Phoenician; theAramaic alphabet, also descended from Phoenician, evolved into theArabic andHebrew scripts. It has also been theorised that theBrahmi and subsequentBrahmic scripts of theIndian cultural sphere also descended from Aramaic, effectively uniting most of the world's writing systems under one family, although the theory is disputed.
ThePaleo-Hebrew alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet was used to write earlyHebrew. Both writing systems developed in parallel, being slight regional variants of the same script. TheSamaritan alphabet is a direct development of Paleo-Hebrew, emerging in the 6th century BC. TheSouth Arabian script may be derived from a stage of theProto-Sinaitic script predating the mature development of the Phoenician alphabet proper. TheGeʽez script developed from South Arabian.
The Phoenician alphabet continued to be used by theSamaritans and developed into the Samaritan alphabet, that is an immediate continuation of the Phoenician script without intermediate non-Israelite evolutionary stages. The Samaritans have continued to use the script for writing both Hebrew and Aramaic texts until the present day. A comparison of the earliest Samaritan inscriptions and the medieval and modern Samaritan manuscripts clearly indicates that the Samaritan script is a static script which was used mainly as abook hand.
The Aramaic alphabet, used to writeAramaic, is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being thelingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off into a number of related alphabets, includingHebrew,Syriac, andNabataean, the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of theArabic alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet emerges in theSecond Temple period, from around 300 BC, out of the Aramaic alphabet used in the Persian empire. There was, however, a revival of the Phoenician mode of writing later in the Second Temple period, with some instances from theQumran Caves, such as thePaleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC.
By the 5th century BC, among Jews the Phoenician alphabet had been mostly replaced by theAramaic alphabet as officially used in thePersian empire (which, like all alphabetical writing systems, was itself ultimately a descendant of the Proto-Canaanite script, though through intermediary non-Israelite stages of evolution). The "Jewish square-script" variant now known simply as theHebrew alphabet evolved directly out of the Aramaic script by about the 3rd century BC (although some letter shapes did not become standard until the 1st century AD).
It has been proposed, notably by Georg Bühler (1898), that theBrahmi script of India (and by extension the derivedIndic alphabets) was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script, which would make Phoenician the ancestor of virtually every alphabetic writing system in use today,[44][45] with the notable exception ofhangul.[46][47]
It is certain that the Aramaic-derivedKharosthi script was present in northern India by the 4th century BC, so that the Aramaic model of alphabetic writing would have been known in the region, but the link from Kharosthi to the slightly younger Brahmi is tenuous. Bühler's suggestion is still entertained in mainstream scholarship, but it has never been proven conclusively, and no definitive scholarly consensus exists.
TheGreek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician.[48] With a different phonology, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script to represent their own sounds, including the vowels absent in Phoenician. It was possibly more important in Greek to write out vowel sounds: Phoenician being a Semitic language, words were based onconsonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without loss of meaning, a feature absent in theIndo-European Greek. However,Akkadian cuneiform, which wrote a related Semitic language, did indicate vowels, which suggests the Phoenicians simply accepted the model of the Egyptians, who never wrote vowels. In any case, the Greeks repurposed the Phoenician letters of consonant sounds not present in Greek; each such letter had its name shorn of its leading consonant, and the letter took the value of the now-leading vowel. For example,ʾāleph, which designated aglottal stop in Phoenician, was repurposed to represent the vowel/a/;he became/e/,ḥet became/eː/ (a long vowel),ʿayin became/o/ (because thepharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonantswau andyod became the corresponding high vowels,/u/ and/i/. (Some dialects of Greek, which did possess/h/ and/w/, continued to use the Phoenician letters for those consonants as well.)
TheAlphabets of Asia Minor are generally assumed to be offshoots of archaic versions of the Greek alphabet.
TheLatin alphabet was derived fromOld Italic (originally derived from a form of the Greek alphabet), used forEtruscan and other languages. The origin of theRunic alphabet is disputed: the main theories are that it evolved either from the Latin alphabet itself, some early Old Italic alphabet via the Alpine scripts, or the Greek alphabet. Despite this debate, the Runic alphabet is clearly derived from one or more scripts that ultimately trace their roots back to the Phoenician alphabet.[48][49]
TheCoptic alphabet is mostly based on the mature Greek alphabet of theHellenistic period, with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at the time. Those additional letters are based on theDemotic script.
TheCyrillic script was derived from the late (medieval) Greek alphabet. Some Cyrillic letters (generally for sounds not in medieval Greek) are based onGlagolitic forms.
These were an indigenous set of genetically relatedsemisyllabaries, which suited the phonological characteristics of theTartessian,Iberian andCeltiberian languages. They were deciphered in 1922 byManuel Gómez-Moreno but their content is almost impossible to understand because they are not related to any living languages. While Gómez-Moreno first pointed to a joined Phoenician-Greek origin, following authors consider that their genesis has no relation to Greek.[50]
The most remote script of the group is theTartessian or Southwest script which could be one or several different scripts. The main bulk of PH inscriptions use, by far, theNortheastern Iberian script, which serves to write Iberian in the levantine coast North ofContestania and in the valle of the riverEbro (Hiber). The Iberic language is also recorded using two other scripts: theSoutheastern Iberian script, which is more similar to the Southwest script than to Northeastern Iberian; and a variant of the Ionic Greek Alphabet called theGreco-Iberian alphabet. Finally, theCeltiberian script registers the language of the Celtiberians with a script derived from Northeastern Iberian, an interesting feature is that it was used and developed in times of the Roman conquest, in opposition to the Latin alphabet.
Among the distinctive features of Paleohispanic scripts are:
Semi-syllabism. Half of the signs represent syllables made ofocclusive consonants (k g b d t) and the other half represent simple phonemes such as vowels (a e i o u) andcontinuant consonants (l n r ŕ s ś).
Duality. Appears on the earliest Iberian and Celtiberian inscriptions and refers to how the signs can serve a double use by being modified with an extra stroke that transforms, for examplege with a stroke becomeske. In later stages the scripts were simplified and duality vanishes from inscriptions.
Redundancy. A feature that appears only in the script of the Southwest, vowels are repeated after each syllabic sign.
^The date of 1050 BC is conventional. The oldest known inscriptions are from the 10th century BC; the predecessor scripts used in theSyro-Hittite states of the 13th to 12th centuries BC is classified as "Proto-Canaanite". Greek travelers shared their alphabet with the people living there who made a new mix of the Greek alphabet, which the Greeks adopted. Use of the Phoenician script declined during theHellenistic period as its evolved forms replaced it; it became obsolete with thedestruction of Carthage in 149 BC.
^Also called theEarly Linear script inSemitic contexts, not to be conflated withLinear A, because it is an early development of theProto-Sinaitic script
^The glyph was taken to represent a wheel, but it possibly derives from the hieroglyphnefer hieroglyph 𓄤 and would originally have been calledtabטוב 'good'.
^the letter namenūn is a word for "fish", but the glyph is presumably from the depiction of a snake, which would point to an original nameנחש "snake".
^abcCross, Frank Moore (1980). "Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts".Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research.238 (238 (Spring, 1980)). University of Chicago Press on behalf of The American Schools of Oriental Research:1–20.doi:10.2307/1356511.JSTOR1356511.
^abBeyond Babel: A Handbook for Biblical Hebrew and Related Languages, article by Charles R. Krahmalkov (ed. John Kaltner, Steven L. McKenzie, 2002). "This alphabet was not, as often mistakenly asserted, invented by the Phoenicians but, rather, was an adaptation of the early West Semitic alphabet to the needs of their own language".
^Cross, Frank Moore (1991). "The Invention and Development of the Alphabet". In Senner, Wayne M. (ed.).The Origins of Writing. Bison. University of Nebraska Press. p. 81.ISBN978-0-803-29167-6.
^abcDunand, Maurice (1945).Byblia grammata: documents et recherches sur le développement de l'écriture en Phénicie. Beyrouth: République Libanaise, Ministère de l'Éducation nationale et des Beaux-Arts..
^abcdefgMerlo, Paolo (March 2022). "Byblos (Pseudo-hieroglyphic)".Mnamon: Ancient writing systems in the Mediterranean. Scuola Normale Superiore.{{cite web}}:Missing or empty|url= (help).
^abcdefghijklVita, Juan-Pablo; Zamora, José Ángel (2018). "The Byblos Script". In Ferrara, Silvia; Valério, Miguel (eds.).Paths into Script Formation in the Ancient Mediterranean. Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici, nuova serie, supplemento 1. Rome: Edizioni Quasar. pp. 75–102..
^abcGarbini, Giovanni (2009). "Decifrazione e origine della scrittura "pseudo-geroglifica" di Biblo".La scrittura nel Vicino Oriente antico. Atti del Convegno internazionale. Milano, 26 gennaio 2008 (in Italian). Milan. pp. 37–62.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link).
^abHoch, James E. (1995). "Egyptian Hieratic Writing in the Byblos Pseudo-hieroglyphic Stele L".Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt.32:59–80.doi:10.2307/40000830.JSTOR40000830..
^abcdColless, Brian E. (1992). "The Byblos Syllabary and the Proto-alphabet".Abr-Nahrain (Ancient Near Eastern Studies).30:15–62..
^abColless, Brian E. (2014). "The Origin of the Alphabet: An Examination of the Goldwasser Hypothesis".Antiguo Oriente.12:71–104..
^abcdSass, Benjamin (2019). "The pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions from Byblos, their elusive dating, and their affinities with the early Phoenician inscriptions". In Abrahami, Philippe; Battini, Laura (eds.).Cultures et sociétés syro-mésopotamiennes: Mélanges offerts à Olivier Rouault. Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology. Oxford: Archaeopress. pp. 157–180.ISBN978-1-78969-282-2..
^abDaniels, Peter T. (1996). "Pseudo-hieroglyphs of Byblos". In Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William (eds.).The World's Writing Systems. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 29–30..
^abMendenhall, George E. (1985).The Syllabic Inscriptions from Byblos. Beirut: American University of Beirut..
^abBest, Jan (2017).How to Decipher the Byblos Script. Berlin: LIT Verlag..
^Woudhuizen, F. C. (2007). "On the Byblos Script".Ugarit-Forschungen.39:689–756..
^Pollard, Max Freedom (2024). "Revisiting the "Camel and the Needle": A Philological Recontextualization of Phoenician Letter Nomenclature".Journal of Historical Linguistics.
^The letters he and ḥēt continue three Proto-Sinaitic letters,ḥasir "courtyard",hillul "jubilation" andḫayt "thread".The shape ofḥēt continuesḥasir "courtyard", but the name continuesḫayt "thread".The shape ofhe continueshillul "jubilation" but the name means "window".[citation needed] see:He (letter)#Origins.
^The root l-m-d mainly means "to teach", from an original meaning "to goad".H3925 inStrong’s Exhaustive Concordance to the Bible, 1979.
^Yigael Yadin,The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands. McGraw-Hill, 1963. The samek – a quick war ladder, later to become the '$' dollar sign drawing the three internal lines quickly. The Z-shaped zayin – an ancient boomerang used for hunting. The H-shaped ḥet – mammoth tusks.
^Max Freedom Pollard (2024). "Revisiting the 'Camel and the Needle': A Philological Recontextualization of Phoenician Letter Nomenclature".Journal of Historical Linguistics. doi:10.5281/zenodo.14848051.
^The Korean language reform of 1446: the origin, background, and Early History of the Korean Alphabet, Gari Keith Ledyard. University of California, 1966, p. 367–368.
^Peter T. Daniels and William Bright,The World's Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 219–220
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