The Phoenician alphabet, with only 22 letters, was so simple and effective that it was adopted by the Greeks and became the foundation of all Western alphabets used today.

23:47every day, and that is the alphabet. Up until that point, writing had been a cumbersome and difficult task. The cuneiform writing systems that had been developed by the Sumerians thousands of years before, and the Hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, were both difficult to learn and relied on the services of a learned class of scribes who spent years of their lives learning them. But the Phoenician alphabet was a

24:19master class in simplicity. It had only 22 letters, and could be used to spell out words phonetically, leaving out any vowels. Quite ingeniously, the shapes of the letters also gave a clue as to how they were pronounced. Their letter B, for instance, was named Bet, which was the Phoenician word for house, and its symbol was drawn with a pointed roof. This simplicity drastically reduced the amount of time it took to learn, and

24:51meant that common traders and merchants may have had some ability to read and write, and to keep records essential for the complex business of buying and selling across the sea. The Phoenician alphabet was such a good idea that it was adopted almost wholesale by the Greeks, as the Greek historian Herodotus recounts. These Phoenicians who came with Cadmus brought with them to Greece, among many other kinds of learning, the alphabet.

25:24As time went on, the sound and form of the letters were changed, and after being taught the letters by the Phoenicians, the Greeks, who were settled around them, used them with a few changes of form. With the addition of some letters for vowels, what resulted was the Greek alphabet, which means that the Phoenician writing system is the foundation of all Western alphabets used today. The earliest piece of Phoenician writing