Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean basin. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Phoenician alphabet was used to write Canaanite languages spoken during the Early Iron Age, sub-categorized by historians as Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite, as well as Old Aramaic. It was widely disseminated outside of the Canaanite sphere by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean, where it was adopted and adapted by other cultures. The Phoenician alphabet proper was used in Ancient Carthage until the 2nd century BC, where it was used to write the Punic language. Its direct descendant scripts include the Aramaic and Samaritan alphabets, several Alphabets of Asia Minor, and the Archaic Greek alphabets.
The Phoenician alphabet proper uses 22 consonant letters—as an abjad used to write a Semitic language, it leaves vowel sounds implicit—though late varieties sometimes used matres lectionis to denote some vowels. As its letters were originally incised using a stylus, their forms are mostly angular and straight, though cursive forms increased in use over time, culminating in the Neo-Punic alphabet used in Roman North Africa.
History
Origin
The earliest known proto-alphabetic inscriptions are the Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai Peninsula and in Canaan in the late Middle and Late Bronze Age. The script was not widely used until the rise of Syro-Hittite states in the 13th and 12th centuries BC.The Phoenician alphabet is considered by some to be a direct continuation of the Proto-Canaanite script of the Bronze Age collapse period. The inscriptions found on the Phoenician arrowheads at al-Khader near Bethlehem and dated offered the epigraphists the "missing link" between the two. The Ahiram epitaph, whose dating is controversial, engraved on the sarcophagus of king Ahiram in Byblos, Lebanon, one of five known Byblian royal inscriptions, shows essentially the fully developed Phoenician script, although the name "Phoenician" is by convention given to inscriptions beginning in the mid-11th century BC.
Byblos syllabary
Another early West Semitic writing system that is sometimes brought into discussions of the background to the Phoenician alphabet is the Byblos syllabary, or “Byblian pseudo-hieroglyphic” script. It is an undeciphered corpus of roughly fourteen to fifteen short inscriptions, almost all found at Byblos and first excavated between 1928 and 1932 by Maurice Dunand, who published the editio princeps and first sign-list in his Byblia grammata.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. 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. The system is therefore usually classified as a syllabary, probably devised to record a Northwest Semitic language local to Byblos, although the underlying language has not been securely identified.
Many signs in the Byblos corpus resemble stylised Egyptian hieroglyphs, but palaeographic study shows that several correspond more closely to Old Kingdom hieratic than to monumental hieroglyphs, supporting the view that the script was created in an environment of sustained Egyptian cultural influence at Byblos. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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 to Linear 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”. 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.
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. 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.
Spread and adaptations
Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet thrived, including Greek, Old Italic and Anatolian scripts. The alphabet's attractive innovation was its phonetic nature, in which one sound was represented by one symbol, which meant only a few dozen symbols to learn. The other scripts of the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, employed many complex characters and required long professional training to achieve proficiency; 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. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos and Carthage in North Africa. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt.
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. The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms, such as Assyria, Babylonia and Adiabene, would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the Common Era.
According to Herodotus, the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet— 'Phoenician letters'—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek 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.
The Phoenician alphabet was known to the Jewish sages of the Second Temple era, who called it the "Old Hebrew" script.