Where did our letters come from? They were borrowed, bent and built, one people after another. Egyptian hieroglyphic script developed in Egypt around 3200 BCE. It started with over a thousand different signs, and these were later cut to about 750. By about 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had around 22 hieroglyphs that each stood for a syllable beginning with a single consonant. Hieroglyphs were a hard script, and it took years to learn them. Alphabets are quicker to learn than older scripts such as cuneiform and hieroglyphs, because an alphabet has far fewer signs. In an abugida, signs are consonant-and-vowel pairs in which the consonant is the main part, while an abjad writes only consonants and a true alphabet gives separate letters to individual vowels and consonants.

Some of the earliest alphabet writing was found at Egyptian turquoise mines, and most of the early inscriptions were found in or near the mines at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai. A group of Semitic-speaking people borrowed some Egyptian hieroglyphs to write the sounds of their own language. Alan Gardiner made a major breakthrough in 1916 by reading the word b`lt (Baalat), and he concluded that the Sinai signs were made by reshaping Egyptian hieroglyphic signs. The method was acrophony: each sign stood for the first sound of the word for the thing it pictured. An ox head, called alpu, stood for the sound a, and a house, called betu, stood for the sound b.

Scholars still debate how old the Sinai script is. One summary dates it to between 1850 and 1700 BC, another says it was invented in the late 18th or early 17th century BC, and a third dates the Serabit el-Khadim finds to about 1500 BCE. A 1500 BCE cave-in at Mine L shows a fairly mature alphabet by then, and Yale archaeologists John and Deborah Darnell found two alphabetic inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol that experts agreed were made around 1800 BC. Scholars also disagree about who first made the alphabet. In 2010 Orly Goldwasser argued that illiterate Canaanite miners invented it, inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, while Anson Rainey argued for highly sophisticated Northwest Semites. These are the debates as of November 2026.

A second alphabet grew up far to the north. Ugarit's texts all come from the Late Bronze Age, about 1550 to 1200 BCE, and in 1928 a farmer accidentally uncovered a tomb there while working in his field. When the texts were first studied, scholars quickly saw that the cuneiform writing was alphabetic, although the first proposed reading had 28 letters, not the correct 30. An abecedary is a list of all the signs of an alphabet in order, and Ugarit abecedaries show the same letter order that later Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets used. The Ugarit alphabet was written with a simple stylus pressed into clay.

Phoenician was the first major phonemic script, with an alphabet dated around 1100 BCE. The oldest Phoenician alphabet inscription is on the sarcophagus of Ahiram of Byblos. The 22 Phoenician letters were simplified from Egyptian hieroglyph pictures and took on a standard form at the end of the 12th century BCE. Before about 1000 BCE the Phoenician language was written with cuneiform wedge signs, so the alphabet replaced a much more complicated system with one of only 22 letters. Phoenician was written from right to left, and its letters left out the vowels. An alphabet could be used to write other languages easily, which helped the letters spread, and in the 9th century BCE the Aramaeans adopted the Phoenician alphabet.

The Greek alphabet developed from the Phoenician script around the 8th century BCE, and the oldest known Greek alphabetic inscriptions date to about 740 BCE. The Greek historian Herodotus told that the Ionians learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians and changed the shapes of a few letters. When the Greeks took the 22 Phoenician letters, they may have added vowels and two more letters, which would bring the total to 24. In its early years there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, and in 403 BCE Athens took the initiative of unifying it. Boustrophedon ran from right to left and then left to right on alternate lines, but by the 5th century BC Greek writing had settled into the pattern we use today, from left to right.

The Etruscans began writing about 700 BC in a form of the Greek alphabet closest to the one used at Cumae, the oldest Greek colony in Italy. A Latin alphabet of 23 letters was derived in the 600s BC from the Etruscan alphabet of 26. In Etruscan the gamma was written C and stood for both the hard g and k sounds in Latin, which was confusing. In Latin the letters I and V stood for both vowel and consonant sounds. The Emperor Claudius tried to separate them by inventing new letters, but only in medieval times (11th century) did J and W solve the problem. The old Greek letter koppa became the model for the Latin letter Q, and the Latin alphabet spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire.

Some scripts were built on purpose. Hangul was created in 1443 and promulgated in 1446. King Sejong wanted to spread literacy and erase barriers, but the alphabet's principal opponents were scholars and nobles. The Korean alphabet was originally composed of 28 letters, each designed to represent a sound, and has since been reduced to the 24 basic letters used in modern Hangul. Sequoyah worked alone for about 12 years and finished the Cherokee syllabary in 1821, and its characters each stand for a syllable. A monk named Mesrop Mashtots produced a unique alphabet of thirty-six letters for Armenian around 406. Cyrillic was created later by scholars of the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire, and as of November 2026 it is used to write more than 50 languages.

Alphabetical order is much older than its wide use as a finding tool. In ancient Alexandria, the librarian Zenodotus was, as far as scholars know, the first person to use alphabetical order, in a glossary of rare words that he compiled. Sorting by alphabet as a way to find things was not widely used until the 13th century.

Words to know

• acrophony: first-sound rule
• abecedary: alphabet list
• phonemic: sound-based
• boustrophedon: ox-turning writing
• Aramaeans: ancient people