The Phoenician script was a writing system of twenty-two letters, all consonants, which was used by the Phoenician city-states such as Byblos, Tyre and Sidon, and it developed from earlier Canaanite alphabets. It was written from right to left and was much simpler than cuneiform or hieroglyphs, since each sign stood for a single sound. Phoenician traders carried it around the Mediterranean, including to Carthage, and it became the ancestor of many later scripts. The Greeks adapted it by adding vowels, which led to the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, while Hebrew and Aramaic scripts, and through them Arabic, also descend from it. It declined as Greek and Aramaic spread.
Before and after
- from c. 1,200 BCE to 1,150 BCEBronze Age collapse
- c. 1,200 BCEIron Age
- from c. 1,200 BCE to 450 BCEHallstatt culture
- from c. 1,200 BCE to 800 BCEUrnfield culture
- from c. 1,200 BCE to 150 BCEPhoenician script
- from c. 1,200 BCE to 546 BCELydia
- from c. 1,189 BCE to 1,077 BCETwentieth Dynasty of Egypt
- from 12th century BCE to 7th centuryOrigins of Utica
- from c. 1,077 BCE to 943 BCETwenty-first Dynasty of Egypt
More in Art, literature & culture
- c. 1,500 BCEOrigins of Zoroastrianism
- 551 BCEBirth of Confucius
- 6th century BCEOrigins of Judaism
- c. 375 BCEWriting of the Allegory of the Cave
- 33 CEOrigins of Christianity
- 381 CEFirst Council of Constantinople
The era
This moment belongs to the Ancient civilizations (3,200 BCE to 500 CE), writing, cities and empires. You can also browse everything in the 12th century BCE.