Modern historians come to the conclusion that the ancestral land of the Phoenicians is the territory of present-day Libya. The Phoenicians were skilled in military and peaceful affairs, they built a developed state and invented one of the first alphabets. Born merchants, they knew how to build strong and large ships, on which they crossed the seas and, according to some information, even the oceans.
Who were the Phoenicians?
There is still no consensus on the Phoenician people. Without their own state, they swam the Mediterranean and captured small pieces of territories from which the empire subsequently arose.
The historical chronicles of different nations describe them either as unscrupulous scammers and boors, then as unsurpassed businessmen and strategists who, not being able to rule their state, rule the whole world.
The origin of the Phoenicians is still a mystery. According to biblical sources, the Phoenicians descend from Ham. For insulting his father, he and his descendants should always be in the service of the Israelites. The nationality itself considered its ancestor to the god Hen, the son of Baal.
The Phoenicians carried their goods throughout the Mediterranean; their ships were often in the waters of the Indian and Atlantic oceans. The Canaanites knew many languages and maintained contact with the ancient Greeks and Etruscans. Their culture and language survived until the Middle Ages, and only after the Arab conquest did the nationality begin to lose its identity and adopt Arabic languages.
The Phoenicians laid the foundation of the writing of almost all the languages of modern Europe. So what are the advantages of the Phoenician alphabet over other writing systems? Why did the phonetic alphabet become the basis for the development of the writing of the Greeks and Romans?
How did the Phoenician letters appear?
It is believed that the phonetic alphabet of the Phoenicians originated in the 2nd millennium BC. e. An image of the alphabet along with the names and transcription is shown below.
Familiarized with the illustration, students find much in common with modern writing. Many people have a question about how many letters in the Phoenician alphabet were consonants, and how many vowels. In the Phoenician alphabet, all 22 letters were consonants. The sequence and names of the letters were already determined and mandatory in the study.
The Phoenician letters acquired their appearance as a result of modifications of well-known graphic symbols. The possible path of such transformations is clearly visible on the example of the letter Aleph.
The primitive graphic image for the ox over time has become the image of the modern vowel letter "A" in the alphabets of the languages of the Romano-Germanic group. Most likely, such a simple and understandable principle of the appearance of letters was the answer to the question of what are the advantages of the Phoenician alphabet over others.
What did the Phoenicians write on?
The Phoenicians used papyrus and plant paints as the basis for the records. This has become the reason for such meager information that modern scholars have about this amazing nation.
Perhaps we would not have received any evidence of the achievements of the Canaanites, if not for the Greeks. Further, due to close trade relations, the Phoenicians adopted the Greek stylus and began writing on wax tablets and writing on stones in later temples and tombs. If you carefully consider the photo of the inscriptions made on the stones, you can find another answer to the question of what are the advantages of the Phoenician alphabet.
Even in spite of the elapsed time, the recordings were preserved very distinctly. All the letters in the Phoenician alphabet, as many as they are, are simple and convenient both for remembering and for quick writing, which was important for merchants. The text is legible, and the letters are so easy to type that it is very difficult to distort them.
Borrowing the letters of the Phoenician alphabet by other peoples
The similarity of the letters of the alphabets can be seen on the example of the characters of the records "Vinca". For the first time, these symbols were found near Vinca (a neighborhood of Belgrade), later in Greece, Romania, Hungary, Moldova, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia.
The image shows and matches letters from various sources. Column 3 is the Phoenician inscription, and column 6 is the letter of the letter from Vinca. The mentioned advantages of the Phoenician alphabet, of which there is no doubt, became the reason for the borrowing of phonetic letters by other peoples who came into contact with the Canaanite people.
Matches of the Phoenician and Etruscan alphabet
People who do not find correspondence between the writing of the Phoenicians and Etruscans may need to visit the ophthalmologist's office. Coincidences not only in the spelling of characters, but also in the name of many letters speak for themselves.
The comparative table in column 1 shows the Phoenician alphabet from the time of 2 thousand BC. Oe., column 2 shows the reflected letters, column 3 is the Etruscan alphabet of the 8th century BC. e., column 4 depicts the Byzantine unique, column 5 is Cyrillic. To the left and right of the table are transcriptions of sounds and names of the Phoenician alphabet letters in Russian and English.