The Phoenician Code
Another reason for its success was the maritime trading culture of Phoenician merchants, which spread the use of the alphabet into parts of North Africa and Europe. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt.
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Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. Its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of writing systems only being learned and employed by members of the royal and religious hierarchies of society, who used writing as an instrument of power to control access to information by the larger population.
The Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 17th century, but up to the 19th century its origin was unknown. It was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform.
The theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single man conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian. The Phoenician letter forms shown here are idealized: There were also significant variations in Phoenician letter forms by era and region. When alphabetic writing began in Greece , the letter forms used were similar but not identical to the Phoenician ones and vowels were added because the Phoenician alphabet did not contain any vowels.
There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact match to Greek sounds were used. The Ionic variant evolved into the standard Greek alphabet, and the Cumae variant into the Latin alphabet , which accounts for many of the differences between the two. Occasionally, Phoenician used a short stroke or dot symbol as a word separator. The chart shows the graphical evolution of Phoenician letter forms into other alphabets.
The sound values often changed significantly, both during the initial creation of new alphabets and from pronunciation changes of languages using the alphabets over time. Phoenician used a system of acrophony to name letters. The names of the letters are essentially the same as in its parental scripts, which are in turn derived from the word values of the original hieroglyph for each letter.
Book, The Phoenician Code - Lebanon Postcard
Yigael Yadin went to great lengths to prove that they actually were tools of war, similar to the original drawings. The Phoenician numeral system consisted of separate symbols for 1, 10, 20, and Other numbers up to 9 were formed by adding the appropriate number of such strokes, arranged in groups of three.
Larger multiples of ten were formed by grouping the appropriate number of 20s and 10s.
The symbol could be combined with a preceding numeral in a multiplicatory way, e. The Phoenician alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in July with the release of version 5. An alternative proposal to handle it as a font variation of Hebrew was turned down. The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Phoenician block:. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet , used to write early Hebrew , was a regional offshoot of Phoenician; it is nearly identical to the Phoenician one in many early writings it is impossible to distinguish between the two.
The current Hebrew alphabet is a stylized form of the Aramaic alphabet , itself a descendant of the Phoenician script. The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic , is another descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. The Sogdian alphabet , a descendant of Phoenician via Syriac, is an ancestor of the Old Uyghur , which in turn is an ancestor of the Mongolian and Manchu alphabets, the former of which is still in use and the latter of which survives as the Xibe script. The Arabic script is a descendant of Phoenician via Aramaic.
The Coptic alphabet , still used in Egypt for writing the Christian liturgical language Coptic descended from Ancient Egyptian , is mostly based on the Greek alphabet, but with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at the time. Those additional letters are based on Demotic script. According to Herodotus , [25] the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet— phoinikeia grammata , "Phoenician letters"—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet , which was later introduced to the rest of Europe.
Herodotus estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years before his time, or around BC, and claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus. The Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician alphabet. It was possibly more important in Greek to write out vowel sounds: Phoenician being a Semitic language, words were based on consonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without loss of meaning, a feature absent in the Indo-European Greek.
Or perhaps, the Phoenicians were simply following the lead of the Egyptians, who never wrote vowels. After all, Akkadian cuneiform , which wrote a related Semitic language, always indicated vowels. In any case, the Greeks adapted the signs of the Phoenician consonants not present in Greek; each such name was shorn of its leading sound, and the sign took the value of the now leading vowel. The Cyrillic script was derived from the Greek alphabet.
Some Cyrillic letters generally for sounds not in Mediaeval Greek are based on Glagolitic forms, which in turn were influenced by the Hebrew or even Coptic alphabets. The Latin alphabet was derived from Old Italic originally a form of the Greek alphabet , used for Etruscan and other languages. The origin of the Runic alphabet is disputed, and the main theories are that it evolved either from the Latin alphabet itself, some early Old Italic alphabet via the Alpine scripts or the Greek alphabet.
Despite this debate, the Runic alphabet is clearly derived from one or more scripts that ultimately trace their roots back to the Phoenician alphabet.
The Phoenician Code
Many Western scholars believe that the Brahmi script of India and the subsequent Indic alphabets are also derived from the Aramaic script, which would make Phoenician the ancestor of virtually every alphabetic writing system in use today. However, due to an indigenous-origin hypothesis of Brahmic scripts, no definitive scholarly consensus exists. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Phoenician alphabet Type Abjad. Egyptian hieroglyphs [2] Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician alphabet. History of the alphabet. BCE Hieratic 32 c.
BCE Demotic 7 c. BCE Meroitic 3 c. BCE Proto-Sinaitic 19 c. BCE Ugaritic 15 c. BCE Phoenician 12 c. BCE Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE Samaritan 6 c.
BCE Libyco-Berber 3 c. BCE Tifinagh Paleohispanic semi-syllabic 7 c. BCE Aramaic 8 c. BCE Brahmic family see E. CE Devanagari 10 c. CE Canadian syllabics Hebrew 3 c. BCE Pahlavi 3 c. BCE Avestan 4 c. CE Palmyrene 2 c. The Wealth of the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Arab civilizations have all left their mark on this beautiful land.
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