The history of the alphabet began in ancient Egypt more than a thousand years before the invention of writing. Already at the beginning of the Old Kingdom (XXVII century BC), the Egyptians used 24 purely sound hieroglyphs. However, the principle of the alphabet was invented by the Semitic peoples.
The earliest examples of these scripts are graffiti from central Egypt, dating back to about 1800 BC. These inscriptions are proof that the invention of the alphabet took place in Egypt. The first alphabet, the Proto-Sinai script, appeared around the middle of the 19th century BC, it was intended for the language of the Semites working in Egypt. The principle of this alphabet was borrowed from the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Semitic alphabet was not limited to Egyptian hieroglyphs for consonant sounds, it also included other hieroglyphs, in total about thirty. There is an unproven assumption that their Semitic rather than Egyptian symbol names were used. By the time the Semitic writing came to Canaan, its symbols were already used only as alphabetical. After the vowel signs were included in the set of all written signs, the alphabet was finally formed as an ordered set of written phoneme designations.
The first Canaanite state that began to widely use the alphabet was Phenicia, so later the Canaanite writing began to be called Phoenician. Due to the location of Phenicia - next to the sea, at the intersection of many trade routes - the Phoenician alphabet soon spread to the Mediterranean. Two variations of Phoenician writing - the Aramaic and Greek alphabets - have had a huge impact on the entire history of writing.
The most ancient was the alphabet of the city-state of Ugarit, known from the middle. 2nd millennium BC e. The order of signs in it basically corresponds to the order of signs in other West Semitic alphabets, known from the last centuries of the 2nd millennium BC. e.: in Phoenician, Hebrew and some others.
The Greek and Aramaic alphabets originate from the Phoenician alphabet, which gave rise to most modern scripts, as well as many "dead-end lines" in the development of writing: the Asia Minor alphabets, the Iberian script, the Numidian script, etc. The order of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet can be traced in the descendant alphabets; the word "alphabet" itself is derived from the name of the first two letters alpha ἄλφα / aleph and beta βῆτα / bet.)
The South Semitic alphabet, which outwardly resembled the Phoenician alphabet, did not seem to originate from it, but from a hypothetical common ancestor with the Phoenician; a descendant of South Semitic writing is modern Ethiopian writing.
Around the turn of the 2nd - 1st millennium BC. e. (possibly somewhat earlier) the Phoenician alphabet of 22 letters was borrowed by the Greeks, who significantly transformed it, turning the ancient Greek alphabet into a complete system. The correspondence between the letters of the alphabet and the phonemes became one-to-one: all the characters of the alphabet were used to write the phonemes to which they corresponded, and a certain letter of the alphabet corresponded to each phoneme. The Etruscan alphabet, which are closely related to the ancient Greek, and the Asia Minor alphabets in Asia Minor in ancient times, which have common features with it, have the same features.
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The Greek alphabet serves as a model for the creation of the Latin and other Italic alphabets. During the era of the Roman Empire, the Latin language and writing were widely spread. Its influence increased in the Middle Ages in connection with the conversion to Christianity of all the peoples of Europe. Latin became a liturgical language in all states of Western Europe, and Latin writing became the only acceptable script for liturgical books.
In the early Middle Ages, under the direct or indirect Greek influence, the creation of the Armenian (Mesrop Mashtots), Georgian, Gothic (presumably Ulfil), Old Slavonic Glagolitic and Cyrillic (Cyril and Methodius, their students) and other alphabets takes place, where the order, names and form of signs are exactly or with certain changes correspond to Greek. The further spread of the alphabet for writing new languages was carried out on the basis of already created alphabets, primarily the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic, etc.
In the 1st millennium BC. e. attested are the South Arabian alphabets, which are an early branch of the West Semitic system.
The first documented inventor of writing systems Mesrop Mashtots, who in 406 in the cities of Edessa and Samosat, completed work on the creation of the Armenian alphabet.