Ancient Near Eastern alphabets

The Ancient Egyptian writing system had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals,
[15]
 which are glyphs that provide one sound.[16] These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides
for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign
names.[5] The script was used a fair amount in the 4th century CE.[17] However, after pagan temples
were closed down, it was forgotten in the 5th century until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
[6]
 There was also the Cuneiform script. The script was used to write several ancient languages.
However, it was primarily used to write Sumerian.[18] The last known use of the Cuneiform script was
in 75 CE, after which the script fell out of use.[19]
In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic
script appeared in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula dated c. 15th century BCE,
apparently left by Canaanite workers. In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell, American Egyptologists,
discovered an earlier version of this first alphabet at the Wadi el-Hol valley in Egypt. The script dated
to c. 1800 BCE and shows evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian
hieroglyphs that could be dated to c. 2000 BCE, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had
developed about that time.[20] The script was based on letter appearances and names, believed to be
based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.[7] This script had no characters representing vowels. Originally, it
probably was a syllabary—a script where syllables are represented with characters—with symbols
that were not needed being removed. The best-attested Bronze Age alphabet is Ugaritic, invented
in Ugarit (Syria) before the 15th century BCE. This was an alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs,
including three that indicate the following vowel. This script was not used after the destruction of
Ugarit in 1178 BCE.[21]

A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the earliest (if not the very first) phonemic scripts

The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called
"Proto-Canaanite" before c. 1050 BCE.[8] The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the
sarcophagus of King Ahiram c. 1000 BCE. This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By
the tenth century BCE, two other forms distinguish themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic. The
Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew script.[22]
The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which
the Ge'ez alphabet, an abugida, a writing system where consonant-vowel sequences are written as
units, which was used around the horn of Africa, descended. Vowel-less alphabets are
called abjads, currently exemplified in others such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. The omission of
vowels was not always a satisfactory solution due to the need of preserving sacred texts.
"Weak" consonants are used to indicate vowels. These letters have a dual function since they can
also be used as pure consonants.[23][24]
The Proto-Sinaitic script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs
instead of using many different signs for words, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems
at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenician script was probably the
first phonemic script,[7][8] and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script
simple enough for traders to learn. Another advantage of the Phoenician alphabet was that it could
write different languages since it recorded words phonemically.[25]
The Phoenician script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians.[8] The Greek
Alphabet was the first alphabet in which vowels have independent letter forms separate from those
of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Phoenician to
represent vowels. The syllabical Linear B, a script that was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the
16th century BCE, had 87 symbols, including five vowels. In its early years, there were many
variants of the Greek alphabet, causing many different alphabets to evolve from it.[26]