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.
The events
- Phoenician alphabetc. 1050 BC · Byblos. The Phoenicians spread a 22-letter consonantal alphabet, attested on King Ahiram's sarcophagus at Byblos. It gave rise to the Greek and Aramaic scripts, and through them to Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic.
- Mission of Cyril and Methodius863 · Great Moravia. The Byzantine missionary brothers Cyril and Methodius arrived in Great Moravia to preach in the Slavic tongue. The alphabet they devised and the liturgical books they translated laid the foundations of Slavic literacy and literature.
More amazing facts
- 1274 BC · 1945 Fifteen years after the Battle of Kadesh, Egypt and the Hittites signed one of the oldest known peace treaties.
- 1200 BC · 1936 The thylacine vanished from mainland Australia about 3,200 years ago, yet survived in Tasmania into the 20th century: the last one died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.
- 1000 BC · 210 BC The terracotta sculptures of Nigeria's Nok culture were being made centuries before China's Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang.
- 880 BC · 814 BC Around 880 BC, Lapita seafarers landed on Tonga — at nearly the same time the Phoenicians founded Carthage.
- 776 BC · 753 BC The Olympic Games are older than Rome: the first were held in 776 BC, and by tradition the city was founded only 23 years later.
- 650 BC · 612 BC The fire that destroyed Nineveh in 612 BC baked the clay tablets of Ashurbanipal's library — helping them survive to the present day.