Phoenician alphabet
| Phoenician alphabet | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | Abjad |
| Languages | Phoenician |
| Time period | Began 1050 BC, and gradually died out during the Hellenistic period as its evolved forms replaced it |
| Parent systems |
Cuneiform script
|
| Child systems | Paleo-Hebrew alphabet Aramaic alphabet Greek alphabet Many hypothesized others |
| Sister systems | South Arabian alphabet |
| ISO 15924 | Phnx, 115 |
| Direction | Right-to-left |
| Unicode alias | Phoenician |
| Unicode range | U+10900–U+1091F |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols. | |
| This article contains special characters.Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols. |
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad.[1] It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. It has been classified as an abjad because it records only consonantal sounds, with the addition of matres lectionis for some vowels.
Phoenician became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it was assimilated by many other cultures and evolved. The Aramaic alphabet, a modified form of Phoenician, was the ancestor of modern Arabic script, while Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet (and by extension its descendants such as the Latin, the Cyrillic and the Coptic), was a direct successor of Phoenician, though certain letter values were changed to represent vowels.
As the letters were originally incised with a stylus, most of the shapes are angular and straight, although more cursive versions are increasingly attested in later times, culminating in the Neo-Punic alphabet of Roman-era North Africa. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are some texts written in boustrophedon.
In 2005, UNESCO had registered the Phoenician alphabet into the Memory of the World as a heritage of Lebanon[2]
Contents[hide] |
[edit]History
When the Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 19th century, its origins were unknown. Scholars at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs.[3] This idea was especially popular due to the recent decipherment of hieroglyphs. However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems. Certain scholars[who?] hypothesized ties with Hieratic,Cuneiform, or even an independent creation, perhaps inspired by some other writing system. The theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single man conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian.[4]
[edit]Parent scripts
The Proto-Sinaitic alphabet was in use from ca. 1850 BC in the Sinai by Canaanite speakers. There are sporadic attestations of very short Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions in Canaan in the late Middle and Late Bronze Age, but the script was not widely used until the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the 13th and 12th centuries BC. The oldest known inscription that goes by the name of Phoenician is the Ahiram epitaph, engraved on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram from c. 1200 BC.[5]
It has become conventional to refer to the script as “Proto-Canaanite” until the mid-11th century, when it is first attested on inscribed bronze arrowheads, and as “Phoenician” only after 1050 BC.[6]
[edit]Spread of the alphabet and its social effects
The Phoenician adaptation of the alphabet was extremely successful, and variants were adapted around the Mediterranean from about the 9th century BC, notably giving rise to theGreek, Old Italic, Anatolian and Paleohispanic scripts. The alphabet’s success was due in part to its phonetic nature; Phoenician was the first widely used script in which one sound was represented by one symbol. This simple system contrasted with the other scripts in use at the time, such as Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, which employed many complex characters and were difficult to learn.[7]
Another reason of its success was the maritime trading culture of Phoenician merchants, which spread the use of the alphabet into parts of North Africa and Europe.[8] Phoenician inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos (in present-day Lebanon) andCarthage in North Africa. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt.[9]
Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations which came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script. Its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of writing systems only being learned and employed by members of the royal and religious hierarchies of society, who used writing as an instrument of power to control access to information by the larger population.[10] The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the Common Era.
[edit]Letter names
Phoenician uses a system of acrophony to name letters. The names of the letters are essentially the same as in its parental scripts, which are in turn derived from the word values of the original hieroglyph for each letter.[11] The original word was translated from Egyptian into its equivalent form in the Semitic language, and then the initial sound of the translated word become the letter’s value.[12]
However, according to a theory by Theodor Nöldeke from 1904, some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script.[dubious – discuss] This includes:
- gaml “throwing stick” to gimel “camel”
- digg “fish” to dalet “door”
- hll “jubilation” to he “window”
- ziqq “manacle” to zayin “weapon”
- naḥš “snake” to nun “fish”
- piʾt “corner” to pe “mouth”
- šimš “sun” to šin “tooth”
Other researchers such as Prof. Yigael Yadin went to great lengths to prove that there actually were tools of war, similar to the original drawings[13] Prof. Aron Demsky from Bar Ilan University showed that there were sequences of letters with close meanings, proving the correct reading of the drawings.[14] In later research it was postulated that the alphabet is actually two complete lists, the first dealing with land agriculture and activity, and the second dealing with water, sea and fishing.[15]
The Phoenician letterforms shown here are idealized—actual Phoenician writing was cruder and more variable in appearance. There were also significant variations in Phoenician letterforms by era and region.
When alphabetic writing began in Greece, the letterforms used were similar but not identical to the Phoenician ones and vowels were added, because the Phoenician Alphabet did not contain any vowels. There were also distinct variations of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how the Phoenician characters which did not have an exact match to Greek sounds were employed. One of these local Greek alphabets evolved into the standard Greek alphabet, and another into the Latin alphabet, which accounts for many of the differences between the two. Occasionally, Phoenician used a short stroke or dot symbol as a word separator.[16]
The chart shows the graphical evolution of Phoenician letterforms into other alphabets. The sound values often changed significantly, both during the initial creation of new alphabets, and due to pronunciation changes of languages using the alphabets over time.
| Letter | Uni. | Name | Meaning | Ph. | Corresponding letter in | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| He. | Sy. | Ar. | Greek | Latin | Cyr. | |||||||
 |
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