The alphabet spreads across the Mediterranean

Phoenician traders simplified writing into a small set of consonant signs; Greeks later added vowels, producing the ancestor of most scripts used today.

Why it matters

With roughly two dozen learnable signs instead of hundreds of logograms, writing escaped the scribe class. Alphabet literacy became the cheapest information technology in the ancient world — the first mass-compatible protocol for language.

Threads

This event sits on Communication and Knowledge.

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From this site

• Writing · 3,000 Years of Communication Technology10 min read

Sources

• Encyclopædia Britannica — Phoenician alphabet