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The alphabet was invented in Egypt around 2000 B.C. as a writing method to show sounds of words. Without doubt, its earliest readers read aloud, their lips forming the words displayed. (Reading aloud continued to be standard practice throughout ancient and medieval times.) The alphabet was not the earliest writing: Egypt, Mesopotamia, and probably China already had nonalphabetic systems. But the alphabet was the most efficient writing system ever found, before or since
Amazingly, with the sole exception of Korea’s Hangul script (invented in isolation in the mid-1400s A.D.), all of today’s major alphabetic scripts have a common origin. All can be traced back through history to one source: the first Near Eastern alphabet of 2000 B.C.
Today Chinese schoolchildren normally take three years longer than Western children to learn to read and write, with most of that extra time devoted to mastering the symbols.
Phoenician literature was not copied and preserved by the Greco-Roman culture that eventually dominated the Mediterranean; in fact, just the opposite: A whole library of Phoenician-language scrolls went up in flames when the Romans sacked Carthage, for example.
Compounds aside, Phoenician words tended to have two- or three-consonant roots, with one consonant almost always first and another often last. For example, the Phoenicians wrote the word “king” as letters m-l-k, representing a word sounding something like melik.
Phonetically, most hieroglyphic pictures denoted three consonant sounds each. One group of a few dozen denoted two consonants each. And—most significantly for our present study—there were some 25 pictures denoting one consonant sound each; together, these constituted 25 essential consonants of Egyptian speech. Here was an entire Egyptian “alphabet,” embedded in the massive hieroglyphic system.
Evidently someone among the Semites, a lone genius or a group, became inspired by this alphabetic principle in Egyptian writing. A purely alphabetic system was envisioned, to be adjusted to Semitic speech. Like the Egyptian counterpart, the Semitic alphabet would show only consonants: To include vowels would have made the letters too many for easy learning.