The Alphabet
Presented by:
Michel N. Laham, M.D.

The Phoenicians' greatest contribution to mankind was the final development and propagation of the alpha bet. Two forms of writing had existed until then: the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform (or wedge-shaped) inscriptions of Mesopotamia. Both started as pictorial representations (or pictographs) of the objects or events which they sought to describe. As these drawings became more stylized and standardized, each came to represent a specific word (logogram) or idea (ideogram). Since spoken language contains thousands of individual words, this system of writing was very cumbersome and complicated. The ancient scribes soon realized that only a few hundred syllables were required to make up all these thousands of words. In time, each logogram came to represent only the first syllable of the object portrayed. This reduced the number of different drawings required to convey meaning. And now that these drawings symbolized a spoken syllable rather than a specific object, they could be simplified to make writing easier.

From that point on, it was only a matter of time before someone would realize that the syllables themselves were made up of 30 or so individual sounds which we now classify as consonants and vowels. Yet it took over a thousand years. Why? Because what seems so simple to us after the fact required a giant mental leap, and the invention of the alphabet ranks with that of the decimal system as one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. A transitional form between cuneiform writing and the alphabet was discovered in Ebla, in which the first consonant of each syllable is emphasized. It is not surprising that the first alphabet in existence was found not far from Ebla, in the Syrian coastal city of Ugarit or Ras al-Shamra.

The Ugarit alphabet dates back to the fourteenth century B.C. and is made up of 30 individual letters that are distinctly cuneiform in appearance. The true Phoenician alphabet, from which all Western alphabets are descended (see table 1), appeared later, around 1250 B.C. In form, it traces its ancestry to the hieroglyphs of Egypt through a transitional script discovered in the Sinai peninsula, the so-called "Sinaitic" script.(4) It contains 22 letters, the first three letters of which were aleph, bet, dalet which passed into the Greek alphabet as alpha, beta and delta. But while these names have no meaning in Greek, aleph meant ox, bet meant house, and dalet meant door in Phoenician. And the corresponding symbols originally represented an ox, a house, and a door, respectively.(5)

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, known to us as the "Father of History," it was the Phoenicians themselves who introduced the alphabet into Greece: "Those Phoenicians who came with Cadmus... introduced letters into Greece , which, as it seems to me, were formerly unknown to the Greeks." Pythagoras, the greatest of the early Greek mathematicians was a Phoenician and, according to Herodotus, so was Thales who is considered the father of Greek philosophy. Although Pythagoras was born in Samos, his parents were from Tyre.(6) From all the foregoing, it may be said that Greek civilization was not merely influenced by Phoenician civilization: it was its direct lineal descendant.