Often without knowing their meaning, other cultures borrowed and altered Egyptian hieroglyphs to create new writing systems. Almost half of the characters of a writing that we call Protosinaitic came from hieroglyphs. The first true alphabet was probably invented by Egyptian scribes in the military, although there is a theory that Semitic copper-mining slaves created an alphabet as a code to help synchronize their escape.

An alphabet is a distinct form of writing which is not pictographic or logographic, it is purely “uniliteral.” Every character represents a number of phonetic variations, and the total number of characters is limited to somewhere between 20 and 27 marks. It is a supremely practical and adaptable system. Just as paper was only invented once, in China, and then gradually spread throughout the world, it is thought that this first alphabet has led, through imitation, to all the subsequent alphabets in the world.

There was never a country called Phoenicia, the Phoenicians were, rather, sailors and traders who lived in independent cities on the shores of the Mediterranean, sharing a culture and a language. The Phoenicians borrowed a few letters from the Protosinaitic alphabet, probably oblivious to their original meaning, to create the Phoenician writing system. Other cultures, in turn, borrowed from the Phoenician alphabet which was to be found throughout Mediterranean world.

The most significant of these was the Greek or Hellenic alphabet, the oldest alphabet still in use, as any visitor to modern Greece knows. The Greek alphabet was a parent to several other writing systems, most notably the Cyrillic alphabet that is still in use among several Slavic cultures, and the Latin or Roman alphabet which is currently in use in most of Europe and the Americas.

As Madge said in the old Palmolive commercial, “You’re soaking in it.”

—Paul Dean, Letterforms, 2007.
Don’t think I didn’t do my research for the above quote. Click here for a nostalgic treat. Well, it’s nostalgic for me, but my first words, according to my parents, were “was brought to you by.”. . .