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Artifact

Phoenician alphabet

Consonant alphabet of the Phoenician cities, carried around the Mediterranean by traders; the probable ancestor of the Greek alphabet.

4 links, 0 backed by primary records

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Dates
c. 1100 BCE – c. 50 BCE
Place
Byblos

The Phoenician alphabet spread by trade: the Metropolitan Museum calls it the root of the Western alphabets. The earliest known inscription is from Byblos.

Connections 4

led to

  • Latin alphabet Scholarship & press 12

    By way of the Greek and Etruscan alphabets.

  • Hebrew alphabet Scholarship & press 3

    A related script rather than a direct line: Britannica says the Early Hebrew writing varies little from the earliest North Semitic alphabets and is closer in letter form to Phoenician than to modern Hebrew.

followed from

  • Invention of the alphabet Scholarship & press 14

    By way of the Phoenicians, who carried the alphabet around the Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE.

located in

  • Byblos Scholarship & press 1

    The earliest surviving Phoenician inscription, the Ahiram epitaph, was found at Byblos.

Timeline 1 date
  1. c. 1100 BCE – c. 50 BCE Phoenician alphabet
Proof 4 sources
  1. Phoenician alphabet, Encyclopaedia Britannica. Scholarship & press
    It is the probable ancestor of the Greek alphabet and, hence, of all Western alphabets.
    Phoenician alphabet, writing system that developed out of the North Semitic alphabet and was spread over the Mediterranean area by Phoenician traders.
    The earliest Phoenician inscription that has survived is the Ahiram epitaph at Byblos in Phoenicia, dating from the 11th century bce and written in the North Semitic alphabet.
  2. The Phoenicians (1500–300 B.C.), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History), Oct 2004. Scholarship & press Archived copy
    Perhaps the most significant contribution of the Phoenicians was an alphabetic writing system that became the root of the Western alphabets when the Greeks adopted it.
  3. Hebrew alphabet, Encyclopaedia Britannica. Scholarship & press
    the oldest example of Early Hebrew writing, the Gezer Calendar, dates from the 10th century bce, and the writing used varies little from the earliest North Semitic alphabets.
  4. Alphabet Origins: From Kipling to Sinai, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 22 Dec 2014. Scholarship & press
    were transmitted, with the rest of the letters, from the Phoenicians to the Greeks and Etruscans, and then to the Romans.
Page history 1 change
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