"Why was writing needed for Phoenician merchants?" - you ask. Let's understand the Phoenician language in more detail.
Phoenician writing is one of the oldest in the world. Its appearance dates back to the 15th century BC. It was the first phonetic and alphabetic writing, that is, one that uses letters that have a specific and fixed sound, and sometimes even meaning.
How did the Phoenician script come about?
The appearance of the Phoenician writing is associated not only with the separation of the Phoenician nationality from the Middle Eastern ethnic group, but also with the occupation of the Phoenicians themselves.
From time immemorial, they were merchants, so writing, we can say, grew out of their kind of activity. Why was writing needed for Phoenician merchants? Everything is very simple - in order to record and describe goods, conduct your financial transactions, and also conclude agreements with your partners: Greeks, Arabs, Romans, Egyptians, as well as with other civilizations of the ancient world.
How is Phoenician writing different from others?
The writing of the ancient Phoenicians absorbed the properties of many of their linguistic "relatives". On the one hand, it is alphabetic-phonetic, that is, each letter represents a fixed sound, from which, in turn, are composed of words. It was this principle that the Greeks, and then the Romans, adopted for their alphabet, creating respectively the ancient Greek and Latin alphabets, which gave rise to all modern European languages.
On the other hand, each letter of the Phoenician alphabet carries a specific and constant lexical meaning, for example, the first letter (read as “a”) has the meaning “bull”. Thus, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic tradition played a huge role in the formation of the Phoenician writing, where each letter is assigned an exclusively defined lexical meaning that does not change regardless of the context in which this or that symbol is used.
So what was the purpose of writing for Phoenician merchants? First of all, to communicate with your neighbors.
The current state of the Phoenician alphabet
Nowadays, the Phoenician writing is used exclusively for scientific purposes, because the Phoenician ethnic group long ago ceased to exist and assimilated first with the Greeks, then with Arabs and Jews, and then with the Turks. However, it is worth noting that the Phoenician language was not lost, the records made on it were preserved in the form of inscribed clay and gold tablets.
Thus, we learned the history of the Phoenician writing, and also why the Phoenician merchants needed writing.