Canaanites - fearless sailors who for hundreds of years dominated the sea trade.
In many examples they said to be vigorous traders and sailors, but little is known about these people. Historians refer to them as Canaanites when talking about the culture before 1200 B.C. The Greeks called them the phoinikes, which means the "red people"—a name that became Phoenicians—after their word for a prized reddish purple cloth the Phoenicians exported.
Their writings, mostly on fragile papyrus, disintegrated—so that we now know the Phoenicians mainly by the biased reports of their enemies. Although the Phoenicians themselves reportedly had a rich literature, it was totally lost in antiquity. That's ironic, because the Phoenicians actually developed the modern alphabet and spread it through trade to their ports of call.
The reign ended after being defeated. Greece and Rome then used many of they key elements of their cultures. This led to a new way of writing. While the legacy of this new system spread many of the cities were destroyed and build over. Hence why little is left.
Standard weight and measure were passed down to the Greeks as well as the use of the alphabet. So the letter/symbol representing a sound continued. After some years the Greeks added vowels A,E,I,O,U by doing this made it closer to they spoken language and sounds.Also letters were given names and they also adopted the right to left Phoenician direction of writing.
Later they experimented with lines that alternated first in one direction then the other. They had to alternate the direction in which the character faced. This style was called boustrophedon.
Finally they settled on writing left to right as it proved more natural (many being right handed)
Romans later (100BC ) adopted it, while changing it slightly it still looks similar to ours we use today.
See below
Interesting factor.....
Look up the adjective "purple" in a dictionary, and one of the first meanings you'll see is a distinction of royalty. The association of royalty with the color purple stems from the ancient reddish-purple dye made from the glands of murex mollusks. The most famous example of this dye is so-called Tyrian purple from the Phoenician homeland along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.
Archaeologists today still find huge piles of murex shells near the ruins of ancient Phoenician settlements—usually downwind from where people lived, as heating sea creatures in salt water for days during dye extraction was bound to have been a smelly process.
Eventually, after the Punic Wars when Rome emerged victorious, the Roman state took over production of the purple dye, and under Emperor Nero the wearing of purple garments was restricted to the emperor alone. The color has remained popular for VIPs ever since.
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| Example of alphabets |
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