The Phoenician alphabet: twenty-two letters that travelled by sea

The Phoenician cities of the Lebanese coast, such as Byblos, Tyre and Sidon, never built a great territorial empire, but for centuries they dominated the routes of the Mediterranean. Together with purple dye, cedar wood and glass, their merchants carried a tool destined to outlast any goods: an alphabet of twenty-two letters, consonants only, written from right to left. From it descend, directly or indirectly, most of the alphabetic scripts in the world.

The sarcophagus of Ahiram

One of the most famous Phoenician inscriptions was discovered in 1923 at Byblos by the French archaeologist Pierre Montet. It appears on the sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of the city, and was commissioned by his son Ittobaal. Its date is debated, but many scholars place it around the tenth century BC. The text contains a curse against anyone who dares to open the tomb: the sceptre of his rule shall be broken and the throne of his kingdom overturned.

This formula reveals an important aspect of ancient writing. Carving a text on stone served not only to remember but to protect: the written word had a binding force, able to act over time even when no one was present to read it. Similar curses appear in many funerary inscriptions of the Near East.

From Sardinia to Pyrgi

Following the Phoenicians, the alphabet reached Cyprus, Malta, western Sicily, Sardinia, Spain and Carthage, founded according to tradition by settlers from Tyre. The Nora Stone, in Sardinia, probably dates to the ninth or eighth century BC and is one of the oldest Phoenician inscriptions in the western Mediterranean. At Carthage Phoenician evolved into Punic, used until Roman times.

In 1964, in the Etruscan sanctuary of Pyrgi, on the coast of Lazio, three gold tablets from the late sixth century BC were discovered. Two are in Etruscan and one in Phoenician, and they record the dedication of a sacred place by Thefarie Velianas, ruler of Caere, to the goddess the Phoenicians called Astarte and the Etruscans Uni. It is one of the most eloquent testimonies to the meeting of cultures in the ancient Tyrrhenian Sea.

The daughters of the Phoenician alphabet

The Greeks openly acknowledged their debt. Herodotus relates that it was the Phoenician Cadmus, who came to Boeotia, who taught letters to the Greeks, who therefore called them phoinikeia, «Phoenician». The myth personifies a real process: the Greeks adapted the Phoenician signs to their own language, adding vowels, and from them the alphabet passed to the Etruscans and then to the Romans.

In the East, Phoenician gave rise to Aramaic, which became the administrative language of the Assyrian and Persian empires. From Aramaic in turn derive the Hebrew square script, Syriac and, through Nabataean, the Arabic alphabet. Many scholars also believe that Indian Brahmi, ancestor of Devanagari, has an Aramaic origin, although the question remains debated.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this invention. A system of few signs, learnable in a short time, freed writing from the monopoly of narrow castes of scribes and made it available to merchants, craftsmen and priests of different peoples. Every time we write a Latin, Greek, Hebrew or Arabic letter, we repeat a gesture born on the quays of Phoenician harbours.