Flinders Petrie found early inscriptions at the Serabit el-Khadim mines in the Sinai in 1904 and 1905. He decided they were alphabetic, but he did not try to find which later scripts they were related to. Alan Gardiner made a major breakthrough in 1916 by reading the word b`lt (Baalat). He concluded that the Sinai signs were made by reshaping Egyptian hieroglyphic signs. The early letters worked by acrophony. Each sign stood for the first sound of the word for the thing it pictured. In the early alphabet 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. Dates from the mines help show how old the alphabet is. A 1500 BCE cave-in at Mine L shows a fairly mature alphabet by then, and this supports the idea that Proto-Sinaitic began to emerge around 1700 BCE. Yale archaeologists John and Deborah Darnell found two alphabetic inscriptions along an ancient road in Egypt's western desert at Wadi el-Hol. Experts agreed they were made around 1800 BC. These are the debates as of November 2026.
Far to the north lay Ugarit. Its texts all come from the Late Bronze Age, about 1550 to 1200 BCE. 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. 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. 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 they 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, and in the 9th century BCE the Aramaeans adopted it.
The Greek alphabet developed from the Phoenician script around the 8th century BCE. The oldest known Greek alphabetic inscriptions date to about 740 BCE. 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 was a style of Greek writing that ran from right to left and then left to right on alternate lines. By the 5th century BC the direction of 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. Cumae, west of Naples, is the oldest Greek colony in Italy and was founded by people from Euboea about 750 BC. 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 letters Y and Z were added at the end of the Latin alphabet in the first century BC to spell Greek loan words, and the Latin alphabet spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire.
Other writing systems show how many designs are possible. The Ge'ez script of the Ethiopia and Eritrea region first developed around the 1st to 3rd centuries CE. It began as an abjad with only consonants, then by about the 4th century became an abugida, in which each sign carries a built-in vowel and marks change the vowel. Morocco officially recognized Amazigh (Berber) in July 2001 and made the Tifinagh alphabet official for writing it in February 2003. Hangul was deliberately built as a system that grows a small set of basic characters into a regular pattern. It was created in 1443 and promulgated in 1446. Chinese characters usually stand for a one-syllable word or word-part, so Chinese is called logographic. English has some logograms too, such as & and $.
Cyrillic is named for Cyril, who made the older Glagolitic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet itself was created later by scholars of the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire. As of November 2026, Cyrillic is used to write more than 50 languages, including Russian, Ukrainian and Serbian. Georgian has had three scripts in turn: Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli. The language once had 38 letters and is now written with 33. A monk named Mesrop Mashtots was asked to create an alphabet for the Armenian language. Around 406 he produced a unique alphabet of thirty-six letters, though sources differ slightly on the exact year.
Words to know
- acrophony: first-sound rule
- abecedary: alphabet list
- boustrophedon: ox-turning writing
- abugida: vowel-marked script
- logographic: word-based writing
