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Evolution of the alphabet

This family tree of alphabets shows the development of the Latin alphabet from its earliest beginnings.

A simpler overview of the data on this page without comments can be found here: Evolution of the alphabet (overview table).

History of the alphabet

Egyptian hierglyphics (from around 3300 BC) – It is unclear whether Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs are the oldest writing system in the world. Both began at roughly the same time, and it is not known if they developed independently or one was based on the other.
The hieroglyphic script started with simple pictograms, and developed later into a complex system of about 1000 characters in the classical Egyptian period. Hieroglyphs could be logographic (representing full words or ideas), phonetic (representing a sound of the spoken language) or determinative (narrowing down the ,eaning of a logograpic or phonetic character). Phonetic hieroglyphs already included single-consonant characters that function like an alphabet. This style of writing was complex, and only highly-trained, professional scribes were able to master it. Hieroglyphs were in use until about 400 AD.

Wadi el-Hol inscriptions (from about 1800 BC) – Semitic workers in Egypt or the Sinai peninsula started to write their language in letters insprired by Egyptian hieroglyphs. Innovatively, they used only phonetic characters, creating the first fully phonemic script in the world. The enabled them to have a much smaller sign inventory than the Egyptians, with only about 22 characters representing all relevant consonant sounds of their Northwest Semitic language. Letters for vowels were not yet included. Such a consonant-only alphabet is called abjad.
Letter shapes, names and sounds were derived by an ingenious system. For each consonantal sound required, they chose a hieroglyph depicting an object that had a name in their language starting with the respective sound. For example, for the sound “b” they used the hieroglyph for “house“ – which was called “beth” in their language. “Head” was “rosh” in their language, so they selected the hieroglpyh for head to represent the sound “r”.
Naming letters using words whose initial sounds are represented by the respective letters is called acrophony. Linking the letter names, shapes and sounds in this way was a great memory aid and made learning to read and write much easier. For the sound “b”, the writer simply drew a stylised house (beth), and so on. Over time, the letter shapes became simpler and more abstract.

Proto-Sinaitic script (from about 1700 BC) – Over time, the earliest letters, such as those found at Wadi-el-Hol, developed into a more fully formed script.

Proto-Canaanite script (about 1400 BC)

Phoenician alphabet (about 1050 BC) – By convention, the proto-Canaanite script is called the Phoenician alphabet from about 1050 BC. The sea-faring and enterprising Phoenicians, a Semitic civilisation on the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, inherited the alphabet from their ancestors, including the letter names, shapes and sounds they represented.

Greek alphabet (from about 800 BC) – The Greeks adapted the alphabet from Phoenician traders for their own needs, copying the letter shapes, most of the sound values and even the letter names from the Phoenicians, even though the Phoenician letter names had no meaning in the Greek language. Greek letters thus had no inherent meaning anymore, they only served as shapes which were arbitrarily assigned to represent specific sound values. Some Phoenician letters represented sounds not needed for Greek, and the Greeks re-assigned them to stand for vowel sounds. This addition of vowels was a major innovation, forming the first full alphabet in a modern sense. For the first time in history, writing could be fully phonetic – meaning that written words were now able to represent spoken words very closely. Around 450 BC, Greek characters were still called Phoenician letters (Herodotus).

Old Italic alphabet (from about 700 BC) – The Greek alphabet spread via Greek colonies to Italy, where the Etruscans started to use it for their own language, forming the old Italic alphabet. During this time, the ancient letter names were shortened.

“The Old Italic script unifies a number of related historical alphabets located on the Italian peninsula. Some of these were used for non-Indo-European languages (Etruscan, Raetic, and probably North Picene), and some for various Indo-European languages belonging to the Italic branch (Faliscan and members of the Sabellian group, including Oscan, Umbrian, and South Picene) or other branches (Venetic, Lepontic, and Gallic). The ultimate source for the alphabets in ancient Italy is Euboean Greek used at Ischia and Cumae in the bay of Naples in the eighth century BCE. Unfortunately, no Greek abecedaries from southern Italy have survived. Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, North Picene, and South Picene, Raetic, Venetic, Lepontic, and Gallic all derive from an Etruscan form of the alphabet.” (Christopher C. Little, 2012).

Latin alphabet (from about 600 BC) – The Italic tribe of the Latins, later called Romans, adapted the Old Italic alphabet for their own language. It “derives from a south Etruscan model, probably from Caere or Veii, around the mid-seventh century BCE or a bit earlier” (Christopher C. Little, 2012).
By about 300 BC, the letter shapes had already taken on the forms we are familiar with today. The Roman capitalis monumentalis script (as used on the Arch of Titus in 82 AD), is even today still seen as exemplary for refined and elegant letter style.
While Archaic Latin had only 21 letters, the letters G and Y were added between 230 BC and 100 BC, resulting in the Classical Latin alphabet of 23 letters. W, U and J were added during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, completing the modern basic Latin alphabet of 26 letters.
Originally, only uppercase letter forms existed. Lowercase letters developed from handwritten Roman cursive letters via Carolingian minuscule (around 800 AD).

The intermediate scripts (Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, Proto-Sinaitic script, Proto-Canaanite script) between Egyptian hieroglyphs and Phoenician are not included in Unicode and not listed here.

Alphabet evolution table

Table of alternatives for predecessors

Some authors propose other or additional hieroglyphs as predecessors to some Phoenician letters:

A simpler overview of the data on this page without comments can be found here: Evolution of the alphabet (overview table).

The information on this page is largely based on the works of William F. Albright (1891–1971), Brian Edric Colless, Alan Gardiner (1879–1963), Orly Goldwasser, Hubert Grimme (1864–1942), Harald Haarmann, Gordon J. Hamilton and Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930).