The Phoenician Alphabet

The Phoenicians were great ship-builders, sailors and textile experts. But they're most known for developing the alphabet that many modern alphabets are descended from. What drove a merchant culture to switch from cuneiform to a new writing system?

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today
we're talking about a piece of history that touches most
people and probably most people that are listening to this podcast.

(00:24):
UH in English, yes, but it also touches many other languages,
and that is the Phoenician alphabet UH. And it actually UM.
I was inspired to research this a little bit because
last time I was in Epcot and I was writing
Spaceship Earth, which for anyone who doesn't know that big
g d s sphere in the middle of the front

(00:46):
of the park that's kind of their icon. There's actually
a ride in that. It's a very gentle and calm
but air conditioned, which is important, and you get to
sit down for a lot ride yes, through sort of
the history of man and how we've evolved communications and
our communication methods. And the ride broke down as we
were just adjacent to the Phoenician tradership and so for

(01:09):
and it was a long and unusually long breakdown. So
for like fifteen to twenty minutes, I just kept hearing
over and over Dame Judy Dench saying, remember how easy
it was to learn your A, B c's. Thank the Phoenicians.
They invented them. So after you hear that a hundred times,
you start to think you should thank the Phoenicians and
do some research. And that is how we landed here,

(01:31):
sort of imagining you in a no TV and no
beer make home or something something moment inside of spaceship birds. Well,
to be fair, I really do love that ride, and
I love watching the animatronics, and I kind of enjoy it,
but it did sort of eventually bore into my brain
and make me want to do some more research. Um So,
just for a little background on the Phoenicians. Uh. Phoenicia

(01:52):
was situated on the eastern side of the Mediterraneans, so
along the coast of modern day Syria and Palestine and
including the land of modern day Lebanon. But they were
pretty coastal. Their actual land wasn't very expansive, which is
likely why they turned to the sea and life as
merchants for most of their um income and sort of

(02:12):
well being. So while today the Phoenicians may be known
most for their alphabet, they innovated in other ways as well.
And one of my favorites is, Uh, they knew how
to make purple dye, which most people who have studied
history at all know is kind of a huge deal. Um,
it's a big textile admanagement. They were actually known for

(02:33):
making some pretty impressive textiles. And the earliest example of
their production of this so called royal purple, which is
a dye that was actually worth more than its way
in gold, was found in the excavations of the thirteenth
century BC levels of um the Phoenician city of Surrepta
in Lebanon. And incidentally, uh, and related to this, we

(02:55):
don't really know what the Phoenicians called themselves. The name
is actually green in origin, and it's believed to signify
the color purple red that they were known for making.
Just kind of interesting. So the dye was so important
they named the whole people after. It was a huge
part of their culture that that was one of the
things they had innovated. Some accounts even credit de Phinitions

(03:16):
with the discovery of glassmaking, and I read a few
different versions of how that was discovered, which is why
I qualify as some accounts uh they are, I mean,
they did make glass, but whether they actually discovered it
or picked it up and then refined it. Some historians
argue about, yeah, I should have asked the boyfriend. Oh yeah,
because he's a pro itt um, yes at how these

(03:39):
things come to be, has a degree in glass science. Yeah,
ask him and we'll get back to that one. But
they were also really great shipmakers and sailors, and according
to legend, one of their greatest sort of accomplishments in
terms of um seafaring was at the request of the
Egyptian king Necho two and a circumvented or circumnavigated rather

(04:02):
Africa in six b C. Which is huge. I mean,
that's a long journey. And uh, most accounts suggest that
they actually stopped at one point and made land and
lived on the land for a little while and got
some crops going to sort of refill the boats. Yeah,
it seems like some sort of restocking would have been

(04:24):
necessary just for what it takes to support people on
a boat. Yeah. And in two thousand and eight there
was a reproduction built of a Phoenician ship and it
actually sailed the same course and that's like a twenty
thousand mile voyage, So that's long, and it took that
modern vessel two years. Uh so presumably you would have
run out of supplies in a two year period and

(04:45):
would have had to restock. UM. There are actually some
historians who suspect that the Phoenicians traveled all the way
to North America, although that is argued in UM in
history circles controversial idea. Yeah, there's a March CNN article
about the possibility, and in it they interviewed geology professor

(05:08):
Dr Mark mcmanimum of Mount Holyoke College, and he mentions
that they're actually Phoenician coins that are inscribed with maps
of the Old and New Worlds, which supports this idea
that they did in fact make it to the America's
at some point. UM. And the same group that recreated
that UM circumnavigation of Africa is currently raising funds to

(05:29):
sail that same ship across the Atlantic and try to
see if that was truly possible, because unlike where they
went around Africa and they could kind of pull in
and stop, there's nowhere to pull in. There's no UM,
there's no rest stop between between there and and here. Yeah,
the idea of going they could find islands, but that

(05:49):
that's kind of a little bit of a long shot. Yeah. Well,
and the idea of going across the whole Atlantic Ocean
in a little tiny boat, it's kind of terrifying to me.
It's not so tiny. It's certainly not a cruise ships. Um. Yeah,
if I'm traveling across the whole Atlantic, I kind of
want there to be you know, fighting city lifeboats and

(06:11):
and a safety drill before we leave about how to
get into the life boats. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure
I haven't read a lot about this particular plan, but
I'm sure they have support crew always at the ready
because they are hooked up to the GPS and stuff.
They traded all over the Mediterranean and parts beyond, and
their culture is recognized as the first real globalized business,

(06:34):
which is pretty cool. And about the alphabet, So, prior
to this alphabet, the Phoenicians were using a queformed script,
just like the rest of Mesopotamia was. The roots of
the Phoenician alphabet are in the fifteenth century BC and
what's sometimes referred to as the Proto Canaanite or proto
synetic alphabet. The earliest examples of Phoenician writing date back

(06:58):
to See and their inscriptions found in the city of Biblos,
and it is no accident that biblos is also the
root word for BiblioTech and bible and bibliography exactly all
of the book related words. Uh. If you were to
look at a linguistic family tree of alphabets, Phoenician would

(07:19):
be really close to the base. And because the Phoenicians
traded with so many other cultures, their form of written
communications spread really quickly and really widely. Most other alphabets
can actually be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet. So
the direct descendants of it include Aramaic, Etruscan, Archaic, Greek,
Old Hebrew, and Proto Arabic. And there's also even some

(07:41):
influence in Indian and East Asian language. Only consonants are
represented in the Phoenician alphabet. There are no vowels. This
is also called an ab jod alphabet. It made me
think of when I was researching it, when you see
people's license plates that just of, you know, a very
reduced version of a word and you have to kind

(08:02):
of fill in the vowels. Because initially I was like,
how did that work? But that was kind of my
modern ticket into how that might function for old real
estate listings for the internet. When you only had so
many columnentes in the newspaper. Uh, and there are actually
only twenty two letters, and those letters can be traced
back to hieroglyphs in many cases, so their form and

(08:24):
even um. There's often in some historical accounts kind of
a flow chart of how like this word for ox
turned into this shape, which turned into this letter which
has similar sound or whatever. Um. So there it is.
It was born of these other things, but it filled
a void of sound based alphabet. Generally, Phoenician was written

(08:47):
from right to left, but in some instances it was
written in a bustpheten style, which means that it would
alternate direction once one line would be written from right
to left and the next from left to right. The
alternate direction would continue, so somebody reading the language could
read their way down a passage of text without ever
having to jump visually to the start of a new line,
which added child. I just wondered why that was not

(09:10):
how we did it well. It has been tried, apparently,
but most mostly Phoenician, to the best of my knowledge,
does go from right to left, and you do have
to do the jump, just like we do in our
left to right reading of English. There were also not
normally spaces between words, which seems a little bit crazy,
I think to the modern mind. But there were sometimes

(09:33):
dots to distinguish words, and sometimes there were vertical slashes
like a vertical stroke. But eventually spaces did come into play,
and by the sixth century BC, spaces were becoming more
common than the dots are the vertical strokes to create
word separation. The Phoenician numeral system was also written from
right to left, and it bears a resemblance to the

(09:54):
Roman numeral system. It combines symbols to create complex numbers
a lot like for the New Worlds. Do Yeah. And
much of the Old Testament was originally written down using
the Phoenician alphabet because there weren't really any other options
in the way of a standardized writing system at the time.
That was an actual alphabet and not pictogram. So why

(10:15):
did the Phoenicians want to create an alphabet in the
first place. Here is a very short answer for this.
Yes they were um they were trading. Roman scholar Pliny
the Elder is credited with defining the Phoenicians as the
first traveling salesman, and Pliny the Elder gets a little
bit of um a grain of salt with anything you read.

(10:36):
He was apparently given to exaggeration, and he was very
very pro Phoenician, like, he really admired that culture. But
it is pretty widely accepted that he was accurate in
this characterization of them um because they were traveling all
over the place and their entire culture was really based
on trade. So, as we mentioned, they traveled all over

(10:56):
the Mediterranean and maybe even the globe. The goal of
new alphabet was to create a system that would be
easy to learn and understand by their business associates. And
before this written communication had been pretty pictogram based. It
was so diversified that different societies could not share written
information and have everyone know what the symbols meant. So
the Phoenicians found this way to break words down into

(11:19):
characters with different sounds that could be combined to create
any number of words. Because this was a written codification
of sound instead of pictograms, it was easily adaptable to
multiple languages. And because this alphabet was invented to record
and track trades, the alphabet itself sort of became traded. Uh.
It was the language of business transactions, but it also

(11:42):
got adopted for general use because it filled this void
of systemized writing that was again not pictogram based, that
people could pick up pretty easily, and let's let's see
more easily transliterate other languages exactly. Cadmus the Phoenician is
giving credit for introduced sing the alphabet of his people
to the Greeks, as told in the writings of Herodotus

(12:05):
and Herodotus says, the Phoenicians who came with Cadmus introduced
into Greece after their settlement in the country a number
of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing and
art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first,
they used the same characters as all the other Phoenicians.
But as time went on and they changed their language,
they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period,

(12:28):
most of the Greeks in the neighborhood were Ionians. They
were taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them
with a few alterations for their own use, continuing to
refer to them as the Phoenician characters, as was only
right as the Phoenicians had introduced them. So even though
it had evolved, they still attributed its um the alphabet
to the Phoenicians. We should point out that even though

(12:51):
this was a defined writing system, there were variations on
the alphabet in different Phoenician colonies cypro Phoenician, Sardinian, and
the Punic and Neo Punic, which is the cursive version
of Punic versions founding Carthage. The Carthage versions of the
alphabets continued to be used until about the third century CE,

(13:12):
and with the development of this new written alphabet also
came new ways of writing, so it kind of catalyzed
a whole new age of communication. Wax tablets came into
being where they could um imprint letters into the wax, pens, ink, papyrus, parchment,
and eventually paper kind of all came from this development,
so it was a very rapid growth element in the

(13:34):
world of communication. In three thirty two BC, Alexander the
Great put Phoenicia under Greek control, and then in one
BC Roamed demolished Carthage after pursuing Hannibal. There after the
Second Punic War, and what was left of Phoenicia became
part of the Roman Empire, and ironically, very few instances

(13:56):
of Phoenician writings actually remain. The papyrus that they often
wrote on, and some of those early forms of paper
has really not survived terribly well. What we know mostly
is from other cultures writing about how awesome the Phoenicians
were and about their alphabet and its development um. The
oldest surviving Phoenician writing example, which we briefly mentioned earlier,

(14:16):
is in Biblos, and it's on the sarcophagus of King Hyrium,
and it's dated at approximately And most of what we know,
like I said, has actually come from the writings of
the Greeks. So even though the Phoenicians have kind of
there's a little bit of a shroud of um lack
of information around them from them, other cultures wrote about

(14:39):
them enough that we know about them. It's really cool.
So now if you're stuck in spaceship Earth, you'll know,
thank the Phoenicians you've ben to them. Also, the way
that Dame Judy Dench says that is so charming that
I will never ever forget it. It's pretty awesome. It's
because Dame Judy Dinch is awesome. Yeah, she is. Prior
to her, it was Walter Cronkite that narrated that ride,
but then they updated it a few years back and

(15:02):
she took it over and did a beautiful job, Holly,
would you like to take a second to talk about stamps?
Do you also have some listeners? You know, it's I
have a few pieces. It's a little bit of a hodgepod.
So the first one is a lesson in an apology
in a correction, which is from our listener nicol Uh
regarding the worst the use of the word orient in
the Cats podcast. And this actually has a multipart thing

(15:25):
because the more I thought about it, the more I
thought that could be talked about on its own for
quite a bit. Um. Early on in the podcast, I
mentioned that the earliest representations of cats were in ancient
Egypt and some other places that I mentioned some areas
of the Orient, which is not an accurate use of
that word. Um. The orient is generally not used to
refer to the place, certainly not to people, but it

(15:48):
can be used for objects. Um. But the reason it's
fallen out of favor is that it's often associated with
negative stereotypes, you know, kind of conjures exoticism, and it
allows for um, some kind of contrade three um, postulating
and generalization to happen. Uh. And I'm really super careful
about it when referring to people. But I will admit

(16:09):
that there are times when I'm looking at older texts
which I think the text that I was reading about
that particular thing in the UM in the research was
from like where this had not fallen out of favor
yet the use of the word orient in that So
I think, I just, um, you know, you fall into
the habit sometimes of the things you're reading. So I
apologize because it didn't. It didn't set off my my

(16:31):
modern um filter meter at all, right, And I was
just like, yes, well, and because there are is also
a cat breed that we discussed, Yes, shall get to
in one moment. Okay, I'm telling me. It's got me
really thinking. So if you want to learn a whole
lot about why UM that you said isn't correct, there
is a really good essay at the Japan Society UM

(16:53):
about it, and will link to that in the show notes.
So normally you would use the word Asian to refer
to a person, a Asia or Asia to refer to
the region, unless you're referring to objects. So I think
of this as rugs. I think some art you can
do UM. But for clarity, as you mentioned, there are
cat breeds that are their actual name is orientals. There's

(17:15):
oriental short hair, Oriental long hair, and sometimes people group
some of the other breeds that come primarily from Asia
under that as well, which then got me thinking about
a whole other problem because, like we said, you could
use oriental to refer to objects, but I think most
pet people would not want to think of their cats

(17:36):
as objects, So that gets into a whole other conflict
of meaning and you know, appropriateness. But it is a
recognized breed under international cat regulations. If you look at
any of the international cat societies that regulate sort of
show cats and how breeding is handled, those breeds are listed.
So that's a whole lot. But thank you for bringing

(17:57):
it up because it's a good thing think about. And
I'm made a woopsy daisy. My second one it's also
about cats, uh, and it is from our listener Andrea,
and she wrote to us on Facebook and said, Hi,
I just listen to the podcast on the Domestication of Cats,
and I can't believe you didn't mention one of my
all time favorite quotes. It is from Mark Twain and
it is when a man loves cats, I am his

(18:18):
friend and comrade without further introduction, just kind of charming.
And I agree. I generally trust a person that likes animals.
I like animals. You're trustworthy. And we we got the
people who were sad that I that I don't like
dogs much, or specifically my remarks about Coca spaniels. They're
not a bad dog by dog basis, Yeah, and that

(18:40):
that's it's mostly a result of in breeding and things.
Copanials you grew up with were not delightful. But we
we've seen some adorable pictures of Cocker spaniels who don't
look bity at all. Bity dogs come in all shape,
sizes and breeds, That's what I know. And sometimes cats
will bite as well. Uh. And then I just wanted

(19:01):
to say thank you to our listener Haley, who sent
us a photo of her two super gorgeous cats. I
will look at anybody's cat pictures if you want to
send them, and if you would like to do that,
you can do so by emailing them to History Podcast
at Discovery dot com. You can also touch base with
us on Twitter at missed in History or at Facebook
dot com slash History class stuff. We're on tumbler at

(19:22):
missed in history dot tumbler dot com, and we're also
on Pinterest. If you want to learn a little bit
more about the subject we talked about today, you can
go to our website and if you enter the word
language into the search bar, you will get a cool
article called how did Language Evolve? Which is to me
ceaselessly fascinating, So you can learn about that and a
car jillion other things. That's the number I'm using at

(19:44):
our website, which is how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics because it
has stuff works dot com. Hmm. Netflix streams TV shows

(20:05):
and movies directly to your home, saving you time, money,
and hassle. As a Netflix member, you can instantly watch
TV episodes and movies streaming directly to your PC, Mac,
or right to your TV with your Xbox three, sixty
p S three or Nintendo we console plus Apple devices,
Kindle and Nook. Get a free thirty day trial membership.

(20:26):
Go to www dot Netflix dot com and sign up now.