One of the most important human inventions we take for granted is the alphabet. Before the alphabet, writing was pretty much like creating mini art pieces. Think about hieroglyphics in Egypt—each symbol had its own meaning. It looked great, but it took forever to write.
The full history of the alphabet is a bit murky, but our first reference point is the Phoenicians. They were the only culture we know of that independently shifted from a pictorial (where each character can represent a word, such as the Egyptians’ hieroglyphs) to a letter-based alphabet. Around 1200 BCE, they created an alphabet with 22 characters, all representing consonants. Being a trading nation, they spread this new form of writing throughout the Mediterranean.
The Greeks found it intriguing and made an excellent contribution by adding vowels. This became the foundation for both the Latin and Arabic alphabets, which in turn gave rise to most modern languages in the Western world today. Some languages still use the pictorial convention, such as Chinese and Japanese, but they are the exception rather than the rule, proving the success of the alphabet.
The simplification brought about by the alphabet made reading and writing more accessible, easier to teach, and quicker for spreading knowledge. It served as the foundation for achieving full literacy of populations much easier hundreds of years later, but one nation had to be the first to adopt it and spread it, and we have that to thank the Phoenicians for.
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