The Emergence of Alphabetic Scripts
Christopher A. Rollston · 2020
As for Early Alphabetic, A.H. Gardiner (following Flinders Petrie's sense) argued that the intellectual soil that facilitated the invention was the ancient Egyptian writing system, including various Egyptian signs that represented single consonants. It is important to emphasize the usage of Early Alphabetic in the broader Levant during the second millennium BCE. That is, Ugaritic is not the only attested alphabetic writing system in the Levant during the second millennium BCE. Since many of the letters of the alphabet are reflective of Egyptian writing, it seems reasonable to contend that Semites who were familiar with Egyptian writing were the inventors. The inventors were not the Canaanites with the pickaxes in their hands, but rather they were supervisors of those with pickaxes. The earliest inscriptions written in “standardized script” are Phoenician. Thus, it makes good sense to call it “the Phoenician script.”