SYMHC Classics: The Phoenician Alphabet

This classic episode revisits the Phoenicians, great ship-builders, sailors and textile experts. But they're most known for developing the alphabet that many modern alphabets are descended from.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, Happy Saturday. Today we are jumping back to
an episode that was inspired by a trip I took
to Epcot. But don't worry if you're not into theme
park things. It is in no way about anything Disney. Nope.
It is about the origins of the Phoenician alphabet and
how that failed a communication gap for merchants when it
was invented. So let's just hop right in. Welcome to

(00:29):
Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we're talking
about a piece of history that touches most people, and
probably most people that are listening to this podcast. Uh

(00:52):
in English, yes, but it also touches many other languages,
and that is the Phoenician alphabet. And it actually um
I was inspired to research this a little bit because
last time I was in Epcot and I was writing
Spaceship Earth, which, for anyone who doesn't know that Big
g d s sphere in the middle of the front

(01:14):
of the park that's kind of their icon. There's actually
a ride in that. It's a very gentle and calm
but air conditioned, which is important, and you get to
sit down for a lot ride yes, through sort of
the history of man and how we've evolved communications and
our communication methods. And the ride broke down as we
were just adjacent to the Phoenician tradership and so for

(01:36):
and it was a long and unusually long breakdown, So
for like fifteen to twenty minutes, I just kept hearing
over and over Dame Judy Dench saying, remember how easy
it was to learn your A, B c's. Thank the Phoenicians,
they invented them. So after you hear that a hundred times,
you start to think you should thank the Phoenicians and
do some research. And that is how we landed here,

(01:58):
sort of imagining you in an no TV and no
beer make home or something something moment inside of Spaceship Earth. Well,
to be fair, I really do love that ride, and
I love watching the animatronics, and I kind of enjoy it,
but it did sort of eventually bore into my brain
and make me want to do some more research. Um So,
just for a little background on the Phoenicians. Uh, Phoenicia

(02:19):
was situated on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, so
along the coast of modern day Syria and Palestine and
including the lands of modern day Lebanon, but they were
pretty coastal. Their actual land wasn't very expansive, which is
likely why they turned to the sea and life as
merchants for most of their um income and sort of

(02:39):
well being. So while today the Phoenicians may be known
most for their alphabet, they innovated in other ways as well,
and one of my favorites is UH. They knew how
to make purple dye, which most people who have studied
history at all know is kind of a huge deal. Um.
It's a big textile advancement. They were actually known for

(03:01):
making some pretty impressive textiles. In the earliest example of
their production of this, so called royal purple, which is
a dye that was actually worse more than its way
in gold, was found in the excavations of the thirteenth
century BC levels of Um, the Phoenician city of Surrepta
in Lebanon, and incidentally UH and related to this, we

(03:23):
don't really know what the Phoenicians called themselves. The name
is actually Greek in origin, and it's believed to signify
the color purple red that they were known for making.
Just kind of interesting. So the dye was so important
they named the whole people after. Yeah, it was a
huge part of their culture that that was one of
the things they had innovated. Some accounts even credit the

(03:43):
Phoenicians with the discovery of glassmaking, and I read a
few different versions of how that was discovered, which is
why I qualify as some accounts, Uh they are. I mean,
they did make glass, but whether they actually discovered it
or picked it up and then refined it. Some historians
argue about, Yeah, I should have asked the boyfriend. Oh yeah,
because he's a pro it um, yes at how these

(04:06):
things come to be, has a degree in glass science. Yeah,
ask him and we'll get back to that one. But
they were also really great shipmakers and sailors, and according
to legend, one of their greatest sort of accomplishments in
terms of um seafaring was at the request of the
Egyptian king Necho too, and they circumvented or circumnavigated rather

(04:30):
Africa in six d b C. Which is huge. I mean,
that's a long journey, and uh, most accounts suggest that
they actually stopped at one point and made land and
lived on the land for a little while and got
some crops going to sort of refill the boats. It
seems like some sort of restocking would have been necessary

(04:52):
just for what it takes to support people on a boat. Yeah,
And in two thousand and eight there was a reproduction
built of a Phoenician ship up and it actually sailed
the same course. And that's like a twenty thousand mile voyage,
so that's long, and it took that modern vessel two years.
Uh So presumably you would have run out of supplies
in a two year period and would have had to restock. Um.

(05:15):
There are actually some historians who suspect that the Phoenicians
traveled all the way to North America, although that is
argued in UM in history circles controversial idea. Yeah, there's
a March CNN article about the possibility, and in it
they interviewed geology professor Dr Mark mcmanimum of Mount Holyoke

(05:38):
College and he mentions that they're actually Phoenician coins that
are inscribed with maps of the Old and New worlds,
which supports this idea that they did in fact make
it to the America's at some point. UM and the
same group that recreated that UM circumnavigation of Africa is
currently raising funds to sail that same ship across the

(05:58):
Atlantic and try to see if that was true really possible,
because unlike where they went around Africa and they could
kind of pull in and stop, there's nowhere to pull in.
There's no um, there's no rest stop between between there
and and here. Yeah, the idea of going they could
find islands, but that that's kind of a little bit
of a long shot. Yeah. Well, and the idea of

(06:19):
going across the whole Atlantic Ocean in a little tiny boat,
it's kind of terrifying to me. It's not so tiny,
it's certainly not a cruise ship, but it's um. Yeah,
if I'm traveling across the whole Atlantic, I kind of
want there to be you know, a flighting city lifeboat
and and a safety drill before we leave about how

(06:41):
to get into the life boats. Yeah. I mean, I'm
sure I haven't read a lot about this particular plan,
but I'm sure they have support crew always at the
ready because they are hooked up to like GPS and stuff.
They traded all over the Mediterranean and parts beyond, and

(07:04):
their culture is recognized as the first real globalized business,
which is pretty cool. And about the alphabet, so prior
to this alphabet, the Phoenicians were using a quine formed script,
just like the rest of Mespotamia was. The roots of
the Phoenician alphabet are in the fifteenth century BC and
what's sometimes referred to as the Proto Canaanite or Proto

(07:28):
Synetic alphabet. The earliest examples of Phoenician writing date back
to b C, and their inscriptions found in the city
of Biblos, and it is no accident that Biblos is
also the root word for BiblioTech and Bible and bibliography
exactly all of the book related words. Uh. If you

(07:49):
were to look at a linguistic family tree of alphabets,
Phoenician would be really close to the base. And because
the Phoenicians traded with so many other cultures, their form
of written communications spread really quickly and really widely. Most
other alphabets can actually be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet.
So the direct descendants of it include Aramaic, Etruscan, Archaic, Greek,

(08:12):
Old Hebrew, and Proto Arabic, and there's also even some
influence in Indian and East Asian language. Only consonants are
represented in the Phoenician alphabet, there are no vowels. This
is also called an ab jod alphabet. It made me
think of when I was researching it, when you see
people's license plates that just have, you know, a very

(08:35):
reduced version of a word and you have to kind
of fill in the vowels. Because initially I was like,
how did that work? But that was kind of my
modern ticket into how that might function. Were old real
estate listings for the Internet when you only had so
many column entes in the newspaper. Uh, and they are
actually only twenty two letters, and those letters can be
traced back to hieroglyphs in many cases, so their form

(08:58):
and even um. There's often in some historical accounts kind
of a flow chart of how like this word for
ox turned into this shape, which turned into this letter
which has similar sound or whatever. Um, So there it is.
It was born of these other things, but it filled
a void of sound based alphabet. Generally, Phoenician was written

(09:22):
from right to left, but in some instances it was
written in a bustropheten style, which means that it would
alternate direction once. One line would be written from right
to left and the next from left to right. The
alternating direction would continue, so somebody reading the language could
read their way down a passage of text without ever
having to jump visually to the start of a new line,
which as a child, I just wondered why that was

(09:44):
not how we did it. Well. It has been tried, apparently,
but most mostly Phoenician, to the best of my knowledge,
does go from right to left, and you do have
to do the jump, just like we do in our
left to right reading of English. There were also not
normally araces between words, which seems a little bit crazy,
I think to the modern mind. But there were sometimes

(10:07):
dots to distinguish words, and sometimes there were vertical slashes
like a vertical stroke. But eventually spaces did come into play,
and by the sixth century BC, spaces were becoming more
common than the dots are the vertical strokes to create
word separation. The Phoenician numeral system was also written from
right to left, and it bears a resemblance to the

(10:28):
Roman numeral system. It combines symbols to create complex numbers
a lot like Roman numerals do. Yeah, and much of
the Old Testament was originally written down using the Phoenician
alphabet because there weren't really any other options in the
way of a standardized writing system at the time that
was an actual alphabet and not pictogram So why did

(10:50):
the Phoenicians want to create an alphabet in the first place.
There is a very short answer for this book. Yes
they were um. They were training Roman scholar Pliny the
Elder is credited with defining the Phoenicians as the first
traveling salesman, and Pliny the Elder gets a little bit
of um a grain of salt with anything you read.

(11:10):
He was apparently given to exaggeration, and he was very
very pro Phoenician like, he really admired that culture. But
it is pretty widely accepted that he was accurate in
this characterization of them um because they were traveling all
over the place and their entire culture was really based
on trade. So, as we mentioned, they traveled all over

(11:30):
the Mediterranean and maybe even the globe. The goal of
the new alphabet was to create a system that would
be easy to learn and understand by their business associates.
And before this written communication had been pretty pictogram based.
It was so diversified that different societies could not share
written information and have everyone know what the symbols meant so,
the Phoenicians found this way to break words down into

(11:53):
characters with different sounds that could be combined to create
any number of words. Because this was a written codification
of sound instead of pictograms, it was easily adaptable to
multiple languages. And because this alphabet was invented to record
and track trades, the alphabet itself sort of became traded. Uh.
It was the language of business transactions, but it also

(12:16):
got adopted for general use because it filled this void
of systemized writing that was again not pictogram based, that
people could pick up pretty easily. And let's let's see
more easily transliterate other language exactly. Cadmus, the Phoenician, is
giving credit for introducing the alphabet of his people to
the Greeks, as told in the writings of Herodotus and

(12:40):
Herodotus says, the Phoenicians who came with Cadmus introduced into
Greece after their settlement in the country a number of accomplishments,
of which the most important was writing and 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

(13:03):
of the Greeks in the neighborhood were Ionians. They were
taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them with
a few alterations for their own use, continuing to refer
to them as the Phoenician characters, as was only right
as the Phoenicians had introduced them, so even though it
had evolved, they still attributed its um the alphabet to
the Phoenicians. We should point out that even though this

(13:32):
was a defined writing system, there were variations on the
alphabet in different Phoenician colonies cypro Phoenician, Sardinian, and the
Punic and Neo Punic, which is the cursive version of
Punic versions founding Carthage. The Carthage versions of the alphabets
continued to be used until about the third century CE,

(13:53):
and with the development of this new written alphabet also
came new ways of writing, so it kind of catalyzed
a whole new age of communication, and wax tablets came
into being where they could um imprint letters into the wax. Pens, ink, papyrus, parchment,
and eventually paper kind of all came from this development.
So it was a very rapid gross element in the

(14:14):
world of communication. In three thirty two BC, Alexander the
Great put Phoenicia under Greek control, and then in one
BC Roamed demolished Carthage after pursuing Hannibal. There after the
Second Punic War, and what was left of Phoenicia became
part of the Roman Empire. And ironically, very few instances

(14:36):
of Phoenician writings actually remain. The papyrus that they often
wrote on, and some of those early forms of paper
has really not survived terribly well. What we know mostly
is from other cultures writing about how awesome the Phoenicians
were and about their alphabet and its development. Um. The
oldest surviving Phoenician writing example, which we briefly mentioned earlier,

(14:57):
is in Biblos, and it's on the sarcophagus of King
high Riem and it's dated at approximately And most of
what we know, like I said, has actually come from
the writings of the Greeks. So even though the Phoenicians
have kind of there's a little bit of a shroud
of um lack of information around them from them, other

(15:19):
cultures wrote about them enough that we know about them.
So now if you're stuck in Spaceship Earth. You'll know,
thank the Phoenicians even to them. Also, the way that
Dame Judy Dench says that is so charming that I
will never ever forget it. It's pretty awesome. It's because
Dame Judy Dinch is awesome. Yeah, she is. Prior to her,
it was Walter Cronkite that narrated that ride, but then

(15:41):
they updated it a few years back and she took
it over and did a beautiful job. Thank you so
much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this
is out of the archive, if you heard an email
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(16:01):
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Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands

(16:23):
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.