The Origin of the Greek Alphabet

The common ancestor of all alphabetic writing systems existing today is the so-called Proto-Canaanite script, which was introduced by the Canaanites, presumably under the inspiration of the Egyptian uniconsonantal hieroglyphic signs, in the first half of the second millennium b.c. Had the Egyptians used only the uniconsonantal signs and let their bi- and triconsonantal pictographic symbols fall into disuse, their writing would have been alphabetic like that of the Semites. However, adhering conservatively to their writing tradition, they were not able to reduce the number of the signs in their script. The revolutionary innovation of reducing the number of signs was made by the Canaanites in ca. 1700 b.c. The alphabetic writing invented in Canaan was a pictographic acrophonic script: thus, the pictures of “house”, “palm of the hand”, and “water”, for example, did not stand for the respective Canaanite words, bet, kaf, and mem, but designated the first consonant of each word: b, k, m. The number of these pictographs was presumably 27. By the thirteenth century b.c. the Proto-Canaanite signs had been reduced to 22, but the pictographic conception still permitted the flexibility of the stances and the writing in any direction: from left to right, from right to left, in vertical columns, and even in horizontal or vertical boustrophedon. Vertical writing disappeared ca. 1100 b.c. At this stage the symbols became more and more linear. Until the middle of the eleventh century b.c. there were still pictographic forms (e.g., the ‘ayin depicting an eye with its pupil), and the letters could have different stances. From the middle of the eleventh century b.c., when all the letters had become linear, most of them had stabilized stances, and they were written from right to left, our terminology changes: the script is no longer called Proto-Canaanite (or Canaanite), but rather Phoenician.