”[A]s far as can be ascertained from the available records, the
principle of alphabetic writing has only been discovered once—hence, in
the whole world there is only one alphabet. . . . [A]ny people which
writes in alphabetic signs has learned and adapted the use of the
alphabet from another people who, in turn, had done the same. . . .
    The earliest preserved inscriptions in alphabetic script date to about 1725 B.C. and were found in and around Byblos, in the country then known as Phoenicia (now Lebanon). It would seem that an alphabetic script which we might call Old Semitic was fairly familiar in that region at that time. . . .
    This Old Semitic alphabet is of course the ancestor of the Hebrew, Phoenician, and Aramaic systems of writing. From these northern Semites, the knowledge of the alphabet appears to have passed, on the one hand, to the Greeks of Asia Minor, and on the other, to the Brahmans of ancient India, who developed from it their devanagari, the sacred script in which the religious rituals and hymns of the ancient Hindus were recorded.”

—John P. Hughes, The Science of Language, 1962.