c. 1900–1800 BCE
A picture for a sound
Writers borrowed Egyptian picture signs and gave each one the first sound of its name: an ox head for ʾaleph, a house for bēt.
See the first findsStart
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ALPHABET
From ox head
to A, B, C.
The letters you are reading are nearly 4,000 years old. Mostly.
The alphabet began as a handful of picture signs scratched in Egypt and Sinai. Traders carried it round the Mediterranean, the Greeks added vowels, the Romans reshaped it, and medieval scribes slipped in J, U and W. Here is the journey, in plain English.
Plain English, with the sources linked.
c. 1800BCE
How old is your letter?Keep in mind
- Sinai
- Phoenicia
- Greece
- Rome, then you
THE SHORT STORY
Pictures became sounds.
Most alphabets used today
share one ancestor.
FROM THE 11TH CENTURY BCE
Traders carry it
The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, all consonants, and Mediterranean traders spread it widely.
Count the letters
700s BCE ONWARDS
Vowels, then Latin
The Greeks added vowel signs. Via the Etruscans, the Romans built a 23-letter alphabet that later grew to 26.
Check a letter's ageHOW OLD IS YOUR LETTER?
Some letters are ancient.
Some are new.
Pick a letter to see roughly how long it has been around. A and B go back to the very first alphabet; J, U and W were split off much later.
Ages are rounded. The earliest dates come from inscriptions found in Egypt and Sinai, and the medieval dates from the history of the Latin alphabet.
TWO NUMBERS WORTH KNOWING
Fewer signs,
more readers.
With twenty to thirty letters,
anyone could learn to spell out sounds.
22 letters
Letters, all of them consonants
The Phoenician alphabet wrote no vowels at all. Its earliest surviving inscription, the Ahiram epitaph, dates from the 11th century BCE, and it is the probable ancestor of the Greek alphabet.
PHOENICIAN · 11TH CENTURY BCE
23 to 26
Letters in the alphabet
The classical Latin alphabet had 23 letters, 21 of them taken from the Etruscan alphabet. Medieval scribes split I into I and J, and V into U, V and W, giving the 26 we use for English.
LATIN · CLASSICAL TO MEDIEVAL
As the Penn Museum puts it, students of an alphabet need to learn only twenty to thirty letters to spell out the basic sounds of their language.
TRY IT YOURSELF
Four ways to
see the history.
Step 1
Write without vowels
Write a short sentence using consonants only, as Phoenician scribes did. Ask a friend to read it back and see how much context helps.
Step 2
Make your own pangram
The quick brown fox needs 35 letters to use all 26. Try to write a sentence that uses every letter in fewer.
Step 3
Hunt for the late letters
In a facsimile of an old printed book, look for i and j or u and v used as the same letter. The split was not complete until the 17th century.
Step 4
Visit the sphinx online
Look up the sandstone sphinx from Serabit el-Khadim in the British Museum collection online and find the signs on its shoulder and base.
ALPHABET FACTS
Five stops on
the way to ABC.
The earliest letters are in Egypt
Two inscriptions found at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt sat near Egyptian inscriptions dated to about 1900–1800 BCE. They are among the oldest alphabetic writing known.
A small sphinx with two scripts
The British Museum holds a sandstone sphinx from the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai, dated to about 1800 BCE. It carries Egyptian hieroglyphs and Proto-Sinaitic signs.
Phoenician: 22 consonants
The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters and no vowels. It was written in Phoenicia until about the 1st century BCE, and its Punic form until about the 3rd century CE.
The Greeks added vowels
The earliest known Greek alphabetic inscriptions date to the 700s BCE. Their key change was adding vowel signs. A Leiden University project argues that new radiocarbon dates point to Greek alphabetic writing by the 9th century BCE.
Latin came by way of the Etruscans
The Latin alphabet grew from the Etruscan alphabet some time before 600 BCE. One of its earliest known examples is on a cloak pin from about the 7th century BCE.
QUICK QUESTIONS
The alphabet, answered.
Short answers to the questions people ask most.
Where did the alphabet come from?
The earliest known alphabetic writing comes from Egypt and the Sinai peninsula. Inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol were found near Egyptian inscriptions dated to about 1900–1800 BCE, and similar signs appear at the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadim.
Who invented the alphabet?
Nobody knows their names. The letters were based on Egyptian picture signs, but each one took its sound from the first consonant of the West Semitic word for the thing it showed, so its inventors spoke a West Semitic language.
What did the Greeks change?
The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters and wrote only consonants. The Greeks adjusted it, most importantly by adding signs for vowels. The earliest known Greek alphabetic inscriptions date to the 700s BCE.
When were J, U and W added?
Classical Latin had 23 letters. In medieval times I was split into I and J, and V into U, V and W, giving the 26 letters used for English today. J did not fully separate from I until the 17th century.
What is a pangram?
A sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” has all 26 letters in 35. The Boston Journal called it a favourite copy set by writing teachers in February 1885.
Destination
Where the facts come from
- Sandstone sphinx from Serabit el-Khadim (EA 41748)The British Museum
- The Alphabet: early to rise, late to bloomPenn Museum, Expedition magazine
- Phoenician alphabetEncyclopaedia Britannica
- From Aleph to Alpha: the origins of the Greek alphabetLeiden University
- Latin alphabetEncyclopaedia Britannica
- The quick brown fox (the pangram's 1885 origins)Michigan Today, University of Michigan
Updated