History of the alphabet

The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in
the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back
to this Semitic proto-alphabet.[1] Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient
Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex
hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they
selected a small number of those commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed
to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language.[2][3] This script was partly influenced by the older
Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs.[4][5]

Mainly through Ancient South Arabian script,[6] Phoenician, Hebrew and later Aramaic, four closely related
members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE, the Semitic
alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa and
South Asia.

Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal scripts of the Semitic type, called "abjads" since 1996, and
"true alphabets" in the narrow sense,[7][8] the distinguishing criterion being that true alphabets consistently assign
letters to both consonants and vowels on an equal basis, while the symbols in a pure abjad stand only for
consonants. (So-called impure abjads may use diacritics or a few symbols to represent vowels.) In this sense, then
the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, but not all
scholars and linguists think this is enough to strip away the original meaning of an alphabet to one with both vowels
and consonants. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today,[9] in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek
alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.

Contents
Predecessors
Consonantal alphabets
Semitic alphabet
Descendants of the Aramaic abjad
Alphabets with vowels
Greek Alphabet
Latin alphabet
Letter names and order
Graphically independent alphabets
Alphabets in other media
See also
References
Further reading
External links

Predecessors
Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and
Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as logograms
(ideograms) that represent a word denoting an object pictorially depicted by the hieroglyph; more commonly as
phonograms writing a sound or sequence of sounds; and as determinatives (which provide clues to meaning
without directly writing sounds).[10] Since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single
consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet (or "abjad"). This was not done when writing the
Egyptian language, but seems to have been a significant influence on the creation of the first alphabet (used to write
a Semitic language). All subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from this first Semitic
alphabet, or have been inspired by one of its descendants (i.e. "stimulus diffusion"), with the possible exception of
the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd-century BCE adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt. The Rongorongo
script of Easter Island may also be an independently invented alphabet, but too little is known of it to be certain.

Consonantal alphabets

Semitic alphabet

The Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt has yet to be fully deciphered. However, it may be alphabetic and probably
records the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are found as graffiti in the Wadi el Hol and date to perhaps
1850 BCE.[11] The table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician alphabet in Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters.

Possible
Egyptian
prototype

Phoenician

gaml
digg
Possible
ʾalp bet thrown haw, hillul waw zen, ziqq ḥet ṭēt yad kap
fish,
acrophony ox house hunting jubilation hook handcuff courtyard/fence wheel arm hand
door
club

Possible
Egyptian
prototype

Phoenician

qup
Possible
lamd mem nun large samek ʿen piʾt ṣad raʾs šananuma taw
monkey/cord
acrophony goad water fish/snake support/pillar eye bend plant head bow signature
of wool

This Semitic script adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to write consonantal values based on the first sound of the Semitic
name for the object depicted by the hieroglyph (the "acrophonic principle").[12] So, for example, the hieroglyph per
("house" in Egyptian) was used to write the sound [b] in Semitic, because [b] was the first sound in the Semitic
word for "house", bayt.[13] The script was used only sporadically, and retained its pictographic nature, for half a
millennium, until adopted for governmental use in Canaan. The first Canaanite states to make extensive use of the
alphabet were the Phoenician city-states and so later stages of the Canaanite script are called Phoenician. The
Phoenician cities were maritime states at the center of a vast trade network and soon the Phoenician alphabet
spread throughout the Mediterranean. Two variants of the Phoenician alphabet had major impacts on the history of
writing: the Aramaic alphabet and the Greek alphabet.[14]

Descendants of the Aramaic abjad

The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called
an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BCE, to become the official
script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
 The modern
Hebrew alphabet
started out as a
local variant of
Imperial Aramaic.
(The original
Hebrew alphabet
has been retained
by the

World distribution of the Arabic alphabet. The dark green areas

shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script.
The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists
with other scripts.

Samaritans.)[15][16]
The Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabataean alphabet of
what is now southern Jordan.
The Syriac alphabet used after the third century CE evolved, through the
Pahlavi scripts and Sogdian alphabet, into the alphabets of North Asia such as
the Old Turkic alphabet (probably), the Old Uyghur alphabet, the Mongolian
writing systems, and the Manchu alphabet.
The Georgian scripts are of uncertain provenance, but appear to be part of the
Persian-Aramaic (or perhaps the Greek) family.

Alphabets with vowels

Greek Alphabet
Adoption

Chart showing details of four By at least the 8th century BCE the
alphabets' descent from Phoenician Greeks borrowed the Phoenician
abjad, from left to right Latin, Greek,
alphabet and adapted it to their own
original Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic.
language,[17] creating in the process the
first "true" alphabet, in which vowels
were accorded equal status with
consonants. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the
alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos. The letters of
the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and
both alphabets are arranged in the same order.[17] However, whereas
separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of
Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek,
where vowels played a much more important role.[18] The Greeks used for Greek alphabet on an ancient black
vowels some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which figure vessel. There is a digamma but no
weren't used in Greek speech. All of the names of the letters of the ksi or omega. The letter phi is missing a
Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were stroke and looks like the omicron Ο, but
what the letters represented, something called the acrophonic principle. on the underside of the bowl it is a full Φ.

However, several Phoenician consonants were absent in Greek, and thus

several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. Since the start of the name of a letter was expected
to be the sound of the letter (the acrophonic principle), in Greek these letters came to be used for vowels. For
example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or voiced pharyngeal sounds, so the
Phoenician letters ’alep and `ayin became Greek alpha and o (later renamed o
micron), and stood for the vowels /a/ and /o/ rather than the consonants /ʔ/
and /ʕ/. As this fortunate development only provided for five or six (depending
on dialect) of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually created digraphs
and other modifications, such as ei, ou, and o (which became omega), or in
some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, u.[19]

Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as Western

Greek or Chalcidian, was used west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other
variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in Asia Minor (also called Asian
Greece i.e. present-day aegean Turkey). The Athenians (c. 400 BCE) adopted
that latter variation and eventually the rest of the Greek-speaking world
followed. After first writing right to left, the Greeks eventually chose to write
from left to right, unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to left. Many
Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or
changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing
to boustrophedon to left-to-right writing.

Descendants

Greek is in turn the source of all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of
the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an /h/, gave rise
to the Old Italic alphabet which in turn developed into the Old Roman alphabet. Etruscan writing, the beginning of
In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, the writing with the Latin alphabet.
and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the
eastern variants: Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic
(which used both Greek and Roman letters), and perhaps
Georgian.[20]

Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in

a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, the
Manchu alphabet, descended from the abjads of West Asia,
was also influenced by Korean hangul, which was either
independent (the traditional view) or derived from the
abugidas of South Asia. Georgian apparently derives from the
Aramaic family, but was strongly influenced in its conception
World distribution of the Cyrillic alphabet. The dark green
by Greek. A modified version of the Greek alphabet, using an
areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole
additional half dozen demotic hieroglyphs, was used to write
main script. The light green shows the countries where the
Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree syllabics (an abugida),
alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
which is a fusion of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand
developed by the missionary James Evans.[21]

Latin alphabet

A tribe known as the Latins, who became the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula like the Western Greeks.
From the Etruscans, a tribe living in the first millennium BCE in central Italy, and the Western Greeks, the Latins
adopted writing in about the seventh century. In adopting writing from these two groups, the Latins dropped four
characters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also adapted the Etruscan letter F, pronounced 'w,' giving it the
'f' sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modern S. To represent the G
sound in Greek and the K sound in Etruscan, the Gamma was used. These changes produced the modern alphabet
without the letters G, J, U, W, Y, and Z, as well as some other differences.

C, K, and Q in the Roman alphabet could all be used to write both the /k/ and /ɡ/ sounds; the Romans soon
modified the letter C to make G, inserted it in seventh place, where Z had been, to maintain the gematria (the
numerical sequence of the alphabet). Over the few centuries after Alexander the Great conquered the Eastern
Mediterranean and other areas in the third century BCE, the
Romans began to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt
their alphabet again in order to write these words. From the
Eastern Greek alphabet, they borrowed Y and Z, which were
added to the end of the alphabet because the only time they
were used was to write Greek words.

The Anglo-Saxons began using Roman letters to write Old

English as they converted to Christianity, following
Augustine of Canterbury's mission to Britain in the sixth
century. Because the Runic wen, which was first used to World distribution of the Latin alphabet. The dark green
represent the sound 'w' and looked like a p that is narrow and areas show the countries where this alphabet is the sole
triangular, was easy to confuse with an actual p, the 'w' sound main script. The light green shows the countries where the
began to be written using a double u. Because the u at the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
time looked like a v, the double u looked like two v's, W was
placed in the alphabet by V. U developed when people began
to use the rounded U when they meant the vowel u and the pointed V when the meant the consonant V. J began as a
variation of I, in which a long tail was added to the final I when there were several in a row. People began to use the
J for the consonant and the I for the vowel by the fifteenth century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth
century.
 Simplified relationship between various scripts leading to the development of modern lower case of
standard Latin alphabet and that of the modern variants, Fraktur (used in Germany until recently) and
Insular/Gaelic (Ireland). Several scripts coexisted such as half-uncial and uncial, which derive from
Roman cursive and Greek uncial, and Visigothic, Merovingian (Luxeuil variant here) and
Beneventan. The Carolingian script was the basis for blackletter and humanist. What is commonly
called "gothic writing" is technically called blackletter (here Textualis quadrata) and is completely
unrelated to Visigothic script.

The letter j is i with a flourish; u and v were the same letter in early scripts and were used depending
on their position in insular half-uncial and caroline minuscule and later scripts; w is a ligature of vv; in
insular the rune wynn is used as a w (three other runes in use were the thorn (þ), ʻféʼ (ᚠ) as an
abbreviation for cattle/goods and maðr (ᛘ) for man).

The letters y and z were very rarely used; þ was written identically to y, so y was dotted to avoid
confusion; the dot was adopted for i only after late-Caroline (protgothic); in Benevetan script the
macron abbreviation featured a dot above.

Lost variants such as r rotunda, ligatures and scribal abbreviation marks are omitted; long s (ſ) is
shown when no terminal s (surviving variant) is present.

Humanist script was the basis for Venetian types which have changed little to this day, such as Times
New Roman (a serifed typeface)

Letter names and order

The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the fourteenth century BCE in the town of Ugarit on Syria's
northern coast.[22] Tablets found there bear over one thousand cuneiform signs, but these signs are not Babylonian
and there are only thirty distinct characters. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order.
There are two orders found, one of which is nearly identical to the order used for Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and a
second order very similar to that used for Ethiopian.[23]

It is not known how many letters the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had nor what their alphabetic order was. Among its
descendants, the Ugaritic alphabet had 27 consonants, the South Arabian alphabets had 29, and the Phoenician
alphabet 22. These scripts were arranged in two orders, an ABGDE order in Phoenician and an HMĦLQ order in
the south; Ugaritic preserved both orders. Both sequences proved remarkably stable among the descendants of
these scripts.
The letter names proved stable among the many descendants of Phoenician, including Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac,
Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabet. However, they were largely abandoned in Tifinagh, Latin and Cyrillic. The
letter sequence continued more or less intact into Latin, Armenian, Gothic, and Cyrillic, but was abandoned in
Brahmi, Runic, and Arabic, although a traditional abjadi order remains or was re-introduced as an alternative in
the latter.

The table is a schematic of the Phoenician alphabet and its descendants.

nr. Reconstruction IPA value Ugaritic Phoenician Hebrew Arabic Greek Latin Cyrillic Runic

1 ʾalpu "ox" /ʔ/ 1 𐎀 𐤀‎ʾālep ‫א‬‎ʾālef ‫ﺍ‬‎ʾalif Α alpha A А azŭ ᚨ *ansuz

‫ﺏ‬‎bāʾ В vĕdĕ, Б ᛒ
2 baytu "house" /b/ 2 𐎁 𐤁‎bēt ‫ב‬‎bēṯ Β bēta B
buky *berkanan

3 gamlu "throwstick" /ɡ/ 3 𐎂 𐤂‎gīmel ‫ג‬‎gīmel ‫ﺝ‬‎jīm Γ gamma C, G Г glagoli ᚲ *kaunan

4
daltu "door" / /d/, /
4 𐎄 𐤃‎dālet ‫ד‬‎dāleṯ
‫ﺩ‬‎dāl, ‫ذ‬‎ Δ delta D Д dobro
diggu "fish" ð/ ḏāl
haw "window" / ‫ﻫ‬‎hāʾ Е ye, Є
5 /h/ 5 𐎅 𐤄‎hē ‫ה‬‎hē Ε epsilon E
hallu "jubilation" estĭ
/β/ Ϝ F, U,
‫و‬‎wāw Оу / Ꙋ ᚢ *ûruz /
6 wāwu "hook" or 6 𐎆 𐤅‎wāw ‫ו‬‎vāv digamma, V,
ukŭ → У *ûran
/w/ Υ upsilon W, Y

zaynu "weapon" / ‫ز‬‎zayn Ꙁ/З

7 /z/ 7 𐎇 𐤆‎zayin ‫ז‬‎zayin Ζ zēta Z
ziqqu "manacle" or zāy zemlya

ḥaytu "thread" / /ħ/, ‫ح‬‎ḥāʾ,

8 8 𐎈 𐤇‎ḥēt ‫ח‬‎ḥēṯ Η ēta H И iže ᚺ *haglaz
"fence"? /x/ ‫خ‬‎ḫāʾ

/tˤ/, ‫ط‬‎ṭāʾ,
9 ṭaytu "wheel" 9 𐎉 𐤈‎ṭēt ‫ט‬‎ṭēṯ Θ thēta Ѳ fita
/θˤ/ ‫ظ‬‎ẓāʾ
10 yadu "arm" /j/ 10 𐎊 𐤉‎yōd ‫י‬‎yōḏ ‫ي‬‎yāʾ Ι iota I, J І ižei ᛁ *isaz

11 kapu "hand" /k/ 20 𐎋 𐤊‎kap ‫כ ך‬‎kāf ‫ك‬‎kāf Κ kappa K К kako

‫ل‬‎lām ᛚ *laguz /
12 lamdu "goad" /l/ 30 𐎍 𐤋‎lāmed ‫ל‬‎lāmeḏ Λ lambda L Л lyudiye
*laukaz

‫מ ם‬‎ ‫م‬‎mīm
13 mayim "waters" /m/ 40 𐎎 𐤌‎mēm Μ mu M М myslite
mēm
naḥšu "snake" / ‫ن‬‎nūn
14 /n/ 50 𐎐 𐤍‎nun ‫נ ן‬‎nun Ν nu N Н našĭ
nunu "fish"

samku "support" / ‫ס‬‎ Ξ ksi, (Χ Ѯ ksi, (Х

15
"fish" ?
/s/ 60 𐎒 𐤎‎sāmek ksi)
(X)
xĕrŭ)
sāmeḵ

/ʕ/, / ‫ع‬‎ʿayn, Ο
16 ʿaynu "eye" 70 𐎓 𐤏‎ʿayin ‫ע‬‎ʿayin O О onŭ
ɣ/ ‫غ‬‎ġayn omikron

pu "mouth" / piʾtu ‫ف‬‎fāʾ

17 /p/ 80 𐎔 𐤐‎pē ‫פ ף‬‎pē Π pi P П pokoi
"corner"

/sˤ/, ‫ص‬‎ṣād, Ϻ san, (Ϡ Ц tsi, Ч

18 ṣadu "plant" 90 𐎕 𐤑‎ṣādē ‫צ ץ‬‎ṣāḏi
/ɬˤ/ ‫ض‬‎ḍād sampi) črvĭ

/kˤ/
19 qupu "Copper"? or 100 𐎖 𐤒‎qōp ‫ק‬‎qōf ‫ق‬‎qāf Ϙ koppa Q Ҁ koppa
/q/
/r/
20 raʾsu "head" or / 200 𐎗 𐤓‎rēš ‫ר‬‎rēš ‫ر‬‎rāʾ Ρ rho R Р rĭtsi ᚱ *raidô
ɾ/
С slovo,
šinnu "tooth" / /ʃ/, / ‫ש‬‎šin/ ‫س‬‎sīn, Σ sigma, Ш ša, Щ
21 300 𐎌 𐤔‎šin S ᛊ *sowilô
šimš "sun" ɬ/ śin ‫ش‬‎šīn ϛ stigma šta, Ꙃ / Ѕ
dzĕlo

/t/, / ‫ت‬‎tāʾ,
22 tawu "mark" 400 𐎚 𐤕‎tāw ‫ת‬‎tāv Τ tau T Т tvrdo ᛏ *tîwaz
θ/ ‫ث‬‎ṯāʾ
These 22 consonants account for the phonology of Northwest Semitic. Of the 29 consonant phonemes commonly
reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, seven are missing: the interdental fricatives ḏ, ṯ, ṱ, the voiceless lateral fricatives ś,
ṣ́ , the voiced uvular fricative ġ, and the distinction between uvular and pharyngeal voiceless fricatives ḫ, ḥ, in
Canaanite merged in ḥet. The six variant letters added in the Arabic alphabet include these (except for ś, which
survives as a separate phoneme in Ge'ez ሠ):
ḏ → ḏāl;
ṯ → ṯāʾ;
ṱ → ḍād;
ġ → ġayn;
ṣ́ → ẓāʾ;
ḫ → ḫāʾ

Graphically independent alphabets

One modern national alphabet that has not been graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet is the Maldivian
script, which is unique in that, although it is clearly modeled after Arabic and perhaps other existing alphabets, it
derives its letter forms from numerals. Another is the Korean Hangul, which was created independently in 1443.
The Osmanya alphabet was devised for Somali in the 1920s by Osman Yusuf Kenadid, and the forms of its
consonants appear to be complete innovations.

Among alphabets that are not used as national scripts today, a few are clearly independent in their letter forms. The
Zhuyin phonetic alphabet and Japanese Kana both derive from Chinese characters. The Santali alphabet of eastern
India appears to be based on traditional symbols such as "danger" and "meeting place", as well as pictographs
invented by its creator. (The names of the Santali letters are related to the sound they represent through the
acrophonic principle, as in the original alphabet, but it is the final consonant or vowel of the name that the letter
represents: le "swelling" represents e, while en "thresh grain" represents n.)

In early medieval Ireland, Ogham consisted of tally marks, and the monumental inscriptions of the Old Persian
Empire were written in an essentially alphabetic cuneiform script whose letter forms seem to have been created for
the occasion.

Alphabets in other media

Changes to a new writing medium sometimes caused a break in graphical form, or make the relationship difficult to
trace. It is not immediately obvious that the cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet derives from a prototypical Semitic abjad,
for example, although this appears to be the case. And while manual alphabets are a direct continuation of the local
written alphabet (both the British two-handed and the French/American one-handed alphabets retain the forms of
the Latin alphabet, as the Indian manual alphabet does Devanagari, and the Korean does Hangul), Braille,
semaphore, maritime signal flags, and the Morse codes are essentially arbitrary geometric forms. The shapes of the
English Braille and semaphore letters, for example, are derived from the alphabetic order of the Latin alphabet, but
not from the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Most modern forms of shorthand are also unrelated to the
alphabet, generally transcribing sounds instead of letters.

See also
History of writing
History of the Arabic alphabet
History of the Latin alphabet
History of the Hebrew alphabet
History of the Greek alphabet
Runic alphabet
List of inventors of writing systems
List of languages by first written accounts

References
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0geof). Stanford University Press. p. 77 (https://archive.org/details/writingsystems00geof/page/77). ISBN 0-
8047-1254-9. "Sampson, Geoffrey (1985). Writing systems: a linguistic introduction."
 2. Goldwasser, O. (2012). "The Miners that Invented the Alphabet - a Response to Christopher Rollston" (https://jo
urnals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/jaei/article/view/16085/16030). Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections.
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Biblical Archaeology Review. 36 (2): 40–53.
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10. "hieroglyphics" (http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/hieroglyphics.htm).
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(1990). Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet. Berkeley: University of California
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g/stable/3210965).
14. "The Development of the Western Alphabet" (https://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2451890). h2g2.com. April 8,
2004.
15. Hooker, J. T., C. B. F. Walker, W. V. Davies, John Chadwick, John F. Healey, B. F. Cook, and Larissa Bonfante,
(1990). Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet, Berkeley: University of California
Press. page 222.
16. Robinson, Andrew, (1995). The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms, New York: Thames &
Hudson Ltd. page 172.
17. McCarter, P. Kyle. "The Early Diffusion of the Alphabet", The Biblical Archaeologist 37, No. 3 (Sep., 1974): 54–
68. page 62. doi:10.2307/3210965 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F3210965). JSTOR 3210965 (https://www.jstor.or
g/stable/3210965).
18. "there are languages for which an alphabet is not an ideal writing system. The Semitic abjads really do fit the
structure of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic very well, [more] than an alphabet would [...], since the spelling
ensures that each root looks the same through its plethora of inflections and derivations." Peter Daniels, The
World's Writing Systems, p. 27.
19. Robinson, Andrew, (1995). The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms, New York: Thames &
Hudson Ltd. page 170.
20. Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms. New York: Thames & Hudson
Ltd., 1995.
21. Andrew Dalby (2004:139) Dictionary of Languages
22. Robinson, Andrew, (1995). The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms, New York: Thames &
Hudson Ltd. page 162.
23. Millard, A. R. "The Infancy of the Alphabet", World Archaeology 17, No. 3, Early Writing Systems (Feb., 1986):
390–398. page 395. doi:10.1080/00438243.1986.9979978 (https://doi.org/10.1080%2F00438243.1986.997997
8). JSTOR 124703 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/124703).
Further reading
Brian E. Colless, "The Origin of the Alphabet", Antiguo Oriente 12 (2014) 71–104.
Peter T. Daniels, William Bright (eds.), 1996. The World's Writing Systems, ISBN 0-19-507993-0.
David Diringer, History of the Alphabet, 1977, ISBN 0-905418-12-3.
Stephen R. Fischer, A History of Writing, 2005 Reaktion Books CN 136481
Haarmann, Harald (2004). Geschichte der Schrift [History of Writing] (in German) (2nd ed.). München: C. H.
Beck. ISBN 3-406-47998-7.
Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, 2004, ISBN 0-8147-3654-8.
Robert K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western
Civilization, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986.
Millard, A. R. (1986). "The Infancy of the Alphabet". World Archaeology. 17 (3): 390–398.
doi:10.1080/00438243.1986.9979978 (https://doi.org/10.1080%2F00438243.1986.9979978). JSTOR 124703 (h
ttps://www.jstor.org/stable/124703).
Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet: an Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography
(Magnes Press – Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1982)
Barry B. Powell, Homer and Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
B.L. Ullman, "The Origin and Development of the Alphabet," American Journal of Archaeology 31, No. 3 (Jul.,
1927): 311–328.

External links
Animated examples of how the English alphabet evolved (https://web.archive.org/web/20080517075022/http://w
ww.wam.umd.edu/%7erfradkin/alphapage.html) by Robert Fradkin, University of Maryland
The Greek alphabet (https://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A216073) on h2g2
The Development of the Western Alphabet (https://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2451890) on h2g2
Site by Micheal W. Palmer about the Greek alphabet (https://web.archive.org/web/20130310150224/http://www.
greek-language.com/alphabet/)
"The Alphabet – its creation and development" (https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20031
218.shtml) on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time featuring Eleanor Robson, Alan Millard, Rosalind Thomas
Book Jacket (http://www.publishersrow.com/JDL/?bookid=351) Early History of the Alphabet-Free cover-to-
cover limited-time access through Judaic Digital Library

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