Phoenician alphabet
22 letters that gave rise to Greek, Latin and Cyrillic
The Phoenicians spread a 22-letter consonantal alphabet, attested on King Ahiram's sarcophagus at Byblos. It gave rise to the Greek, Latin and Aramaic scripts, and through them to Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 11th century BC
Did you know
Cyrillic is a distant descendant of the Phoenician alphabet: Phoenician gave rise to Greek, and Greek to the letters created almost 2,000 years later.
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Asia
- 1046 BC Battle of Muye — 4 years later