In the earliest writing systems (see a visual depiction of the alphabet form 1100 BC to Modern), each symbol stood for a single word or syllable. To write or read in one of these systems, you needed to know a large number of symbols. Cuneiform, the syllabic system used in Mesopotamia, had over 600 symbols, some of which stood for whole words.

Sometime between 1700 and 1500 BC, someone on the Arabian Peninsula came up with a new way of writing: using a single symbol to represent a single sound in the language. This new system, the very first alphabet, was a revolutionary simplification of earlier writing systems.

You can see how much the alphabet simplifies writing by counting up the number of different symbols that would be needed to write the first paragraph on this poster. Using our alphabetic system, you only need 26 symbols.
The first alphabet was developed in ancient Phoenicia, a region that is now part of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. In the Phoenician's 22-letter alphabet, each letter is a picture of a common object, and the letter represents the first sound in the word for that object. If you were using a similar system in English, a picture of a moon could represent the sound of M.

Inset: This initial, from a very early thirteenth-century manuscript of Peter Lombard's Great Gloss on St. Paul, shows Peter Lombard as the bearded scholar with quill and knife.

Take a look at the Phoenician letters. Beside each Phoenician letter is the modern Hebrew letter that evolved from the Phoenician, and the Hebrew names for the letters. It's easy to see the oxhead in the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, the letter that became our letter A. Other symbols require a stretch of the imagination. The symbol that became the letter M, for example, may have started as a simple wiggle representing mayyuma, or water.

The Phoenician alphabet and other ancient alphabets of the Near East didn't have any vowels, only consonants. Someone reading a message had to figure out the vowels from the context-something that is possible even in English. Rdng wrds wtht vwls s dffclt, bt nt mpssbl. You can figure out the missing sounds from the context: though bt could be "bite" or "but" or "bat" or "bit" or "boat," only "but" makes sense.

Scholars believe that the Greeks learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians sometime before 700 BC. Compare the Phoenician letters with the early Greek letters and you can see similarities. The Greek names for the letters have no meaning in Greek, but are very similar to the Hebrew names.
Different languages use different sounds, and some of the Phoenicianletters represented sounds that aren't Greek. The Greek took these letters and made them into vowels. For example, the letter that became O represented, I Phoenician, a gutteral sound that began the word for eye: `Ayin.

The Greeks also added letters to represent sounds that were common in Greek. In our alphabet, we would represent the sound of the Greek letter Phi as ph and the Greek letter Psi as ps. English words that contain thee letter combinations-elephant and psychiatrist, for example-are of Greek derivation.

In 700 BC, the Greeks traded frequently with the Etruscans, a civilization in the region now known as Italy. At about this time, the Etruscans began to sue a version of the Greek alphabet.

You can see the early Etruscan alphabet had more in common with the early Greek alphabet than it does with the Classical Greek alphabet. The Classical Greek alphabet was not adopted in Athens until 402 BC, long after the Etruscans had modified the Greek alphabet for their own needs.

In 509 BC, the Roman conquered the Etruscans and adopted many features of Etruscan culture, including the Etruscan alphabet. Of course, the Romans had to make a few changes so that the alphabet would match the Roman language, Latin. They created one new letter, the letter g, and dropped letters that represented sounds they didn't need. The early Roman alphabet lacks the letter the Greeks called Zeta and uses a variant of the letter the Greeks called Upsilon. When the Romans conquered Greece, they needed the sounds produced by these letters-which is why the Classic Latin alphabet had two new letters derived from Zeta and Upsilon at the end of the alphabet, the letters Y and Z.

Compare the Classical Latin alphabet and the modern Roman alphabet and you'll see that the two are very similar. The letters U and W were both developed from the letter V in the Middle Ages. Finally, the letter I was developed from the letter J in about 1400 AD. All the western European scripts came from the Latin alphabet.

Source - 1992 The Exploratorium