From Powerline’s The Week in Pictures

And what an great opportunity to quote from the “Epilogue” of Miss Missy’s School!

The Phoenician Alphabet (Chapter IXX: Good Advice, pg. x)

Missy had lost interest in Gilbert’s analysis of Aristotle’s thinking about practical and theoretical knowledge. By the time he said “phronesis” she thought he had said, “Phoenicians,” or as she pronounced it, “Foneeshans.” As John explains, phronesis is the Greek word for practical knowledge. It means knowing the right thing to do in a particular circumstance, and then acting in that right way.

The Phoenicians were an ancient people who lived at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea beginning about 2000 years before Christ. They were the greatest shipbuilders, sailors, and tradesmen of the time. They themselves created glass work, woven cloth, and a famous red-purple dye called Tyrian purple. Their trading began with the neighboring Egyptians, from whom they learned many things, but over time they started to trade with societies as far away as the west coast of Africa, Spain, and it’s thought even the British Isles, and possibly India. In many of these places they established influential colonies, such as Carthage on the north coast of Africa, another at the Straight of Gibraltar, and others on islands off the coasts of Greece and Italy. So it was that the Phoenicians spread each of the many cultures’ arts and industries to other far-off societies.

Each of these many lands and cultures had its own way of writing. For example, the Egyptians used hieroglyphics as their writing system. Others used logogram or pictogram systems. These were all a bit like our modern emojis. The problem with these systems, though, was that they each had thousands of individual characters. It took a long time to learn the characters and symbols, and so only royalty and the clergy had the time to learn to write.

For the Phoenicians, trading peacefully and fairly with these societies meant that written records of the transactions, such as sales, purchases, and pay for the ships’ sailors and captains, had to be kept. Remember, though, each society had its own writing system, and they were all very complex. Around the year 1400 B.C. the Phoenicians solved the complicated puzzle of how to keep written records of transactions with so many different cultures. No one knows quite who or where, but someone or group invented a writing system using only 22 symbols, representing 22 consonant sounds. Anyone can learn how to write just 22 characters. (You know 52 printed ones, plus 52 cursive ones!) The Phoenicians used and taught this writing system to the entire western world. Everyone in the other societies at once recognized what a precious gift this was. Even the common farmers and shopkeepers began to use it. The ancient Greeks, who were not yet at the peak of their civilization, added vowel characters. Other societies made small changes, too. But all of their written languages began with the Phoenician alphabet.
Some say that writing was invented in three different times and places, but in only one time and place, that of the ancient Phoenicians, was the alphabet as we have today invented.