In the chart below you can see in the far right column the original Phoenician glyphs, and how they were morphed upon adoption by the Greeks. When the Greek Alphabet was first adopted from the Phoenicians it had 24 letters and was written from right to left. The Phoenicians were a seafaring mercantile people people, who had established a vast trading network across the Mediterranean and beyond, bringing them into contact with a broader spectrum of cultures and people than most other civilizations. Around 700 BCE the Greeks adopted their writing system from the same phonetic system of letters in use by the seafaring Phoenicians, who in turn derived their script from the more ancient writing systems of Mesopotamia and Egypt, Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs, respectively. The Greekās did not invent their alphabet. ![]() Origins of the Greek Alphabet Adapting The Phoenician Alphabet The Greek alphabet has been in continuous usage from some 2700 years, in a stable form so that modern speakers could still read ancient texts and inscriptions. It inspired the Latin alphabet used to write modern English, and also is the ancestor of the Cyrillic script used to write Russian and Serbian, among other languages. ![]() The Greek Alphabet is the system of letters used by the Ancient Greeks, who borrowed their letters from the seafaring Phoenicians.
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