The Phoenician alphabet

The story

Twenty-two signs to write everything

Try writing a sentence without using the vowels: “ll th lttrs”. A trained reader might perhaps understand it all the same. The Phoenicians wrote exactly like this. Their alphabet had twenty-two signs, and all of them stood for consonants. The vowels were not written: the reader guessed them from the sense, as we do with certain abbreviations. Later, to make some words clearer, people began to use a few consonants to indicate a vowel too.

It was written from right to left, the opposite of the way we do it. Scholars note that it was one of the first writing systems with a fixed direction. With only twenty-two signs, learning to write was much easier than with hieroglyphs or cuneiform.

The names of the letters

Each letter had a name that recalled an object, and this is the thread that links us to the past. The first was called aleph, meaning “ox”; the second bet, “house”; the third gimel, which means “throwing stick” or, according to other interpretations, “camel”. The oldest signs came from drawings, like those of the Sinai inscriptions, and over time they were simplified until they became letters. If you look at our A, in fact, with a little imagination you can see an ox's head turned upside down.

The first inscriptions

What is the oldest Phoenician inscription? It depends on how things are dated. One of the most celebrated is carved on the sarcophagus of Ahiram, which was discovered in 1923 at Byblos, in present-day Lebanon, by the French archaeologist Pierre Montet. After a landslide some royal tombs had been revealed, and in tomb number five the sarcophagus was found. On its rim there is an inscription of thirty-eight words: it is a warning. It says that anyone, king or governor, who opens the tomb or erases the inscription will be struck by a curse. The sarcophagus is decorated with reliefs showing a king seated on a throne with sphinxes and a priestess offering him a lotus flower. Today it is in the National Museum of Beirut.

The date of the sarcophagus is debated. It is generally thought to be around 1000 BC, but some scholars place it around 850 BC, and another scholar, Edith Porada, even later, between the middle of the 9th and the 8th century BC. This is why the conventional date for the beginning of the Phoenician alphabet, about 1050 BC, is more a choice made by historians than a sure point. The oldest securely dated inscriptions are from the 10th century BC. Among the other important witnesses are the Kilamuwa stele, of the 9th century BC, and the Nora stele, in Sardinia, of about 800 BC, which we discuss in another card.

Travelling with the merchants

The Phoenicians, merchants and sailors, carried their writing wherever they went. From the 9th century BC the peoples who met it adapted it to their own language. The Greeks made the most important change: they added the vowels. It was a brilliant idea, which made the alphabet much more precise.

From a variant of Greek, the one from Cumae, in Campania, the alphabets of ancient Italy were born, including Latin, and Etruscan descends from it too. By another route, Aramaic derived from Phoenician, and from that Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic. This is why the letters you are reading are relatives of those of an eastern language: there is a single family, which starts here.

The myth of Cadmus

The Greeks had an explanation all their own, which the historian Herodotus told in the 5th century BC. According to him, a Phoenician prince named Cadmus had come to Greece and brought letters with him. Herodotus placed Cadmus about sixteen hundred years before his own time, but the true story seems more recent: the Greeks' adoption of the alphabet took place about three hundred and fifty years before him. The myth nevertheless says one true thing: the Greeks knew they owed their letters to the Phoenicians.