Phoenician Language and Writing: The History and Legacy of the Ancient World’s Most Influential Script

There is no doubt that the alphabets and forms of writing employed by most European languages comes directly from the Phoenicians, but the process by which that took place is still a mystery. Some of the ancient historians provided theories concerning how the Phoenicians gave their alphabet and system of writing to the Greeks, and Herodotus offered an account that is probably more accurate than most. He claimed, “The Phoenicians who came with Cadmus – amongst whom were the Gephyraei – introduced into Greece, after their settlement in the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first, they used the same characters as all the other Phoenicians, but as time went on, and they changed their language, they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period most of the Greeks in the neighborhood were Ionians; they were also taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them, with a few alterations, for their own use, continuing to refer to them as Phoenician characters – as was only right, as the Phoenicians had introduced them.”

Like many of Herodotus’ other passages in Histories, there is truth wrapped with some errors. The Greeks certainly knew of the concept of writing before the Phoenicians, as the Mycenaeans used the Linear B script, but that knowledge had vanished at the end of the Bronze Age (Morkot 1996, 18). Perhaps what makes Herodotus’ account accurate and most interesting is his description of how the writing evolved. He mentions how the Greeks “changed the shape of their letters”, which is the normal course when any group of people adopts a script to write their native language. For example, there are slight variations in the Latin script employed by most modern Western European languages, such as the umlauts in German or the various accents in French and Spanish.