“The Egyptian symbol for ‘sun’ was a picture of the sun. The spoken Egyptian word for ‘sun’ was re. The sun picture is often found in hieroglyphic inscriptions standing not for “sun” but for the spoken syllable re occuring in a longer word.
It remained for the Phoenicians and Hebrews finally to use their symbols with the exclusively phonetic value of single syllables or consonants, dropping the ideographic connotation altogether. At this point, we have the beginning of a true phonetic alphabet.”

—Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.