“The Phoenicians were probably the greatest seafarers of the ancient world and inhabited regions that are now Syria, Israel, and Lebanon. Their principal cities were all ports . . . and one of their famous ports, Byblos, is known today as the point of origin where the Phoenician alphabet entered, and profoundly affected, the Greek world.

The Phoenicians’ system of writing was unique. . . . [T]he Phoenicians, somewhere around 2000 B.C., severed the relationship between pictures and words for all time in all Occidental cultures. By creating symbols with phonetic values for single syllables and consonants, they thus devised the first almost-pure phonetic alphabet. (It still did not recognize vowels.)

The closest system of writing had been Sumerian cuneiform. It is unknown whether the Phoenicians arrived at their largely phonetic alphabet by simplifying Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics. . . .

Byblos was also the port from which papyrus traveled to Egypt and Greece, and the city’s name has been immortalized in many Greek and Western words: biblion, Greek for “rolled paper” or “scroll”; and our words “Bible,” “bibliography,” and “bibliophile.””

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.