Semitic Languages
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is a Northwest Semitic consonantal writing system (abjad) of 22 letters, written right to left and used across the eastern and central Mediterranean in the early 1st millennium BCE. Developed from Proto‑Canaanite/Proto‑Sinaitic antecedents, it became a principal ancestor of later scripts, notably Greek and Aramaic, and through them influenced many modern writing systems.
Phoenicians
The Phoenicians were Semitic-speaking maritime peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, centered on the Levantine city-states of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Arwad. Active especially in the 1st millennium BCE, they developed extensive trade networks, founded colonies such as Carthage, and spread a 22-letter consonantal script that influenced the Greek and later Latin alphabets. Their cities were successively incorporated into the Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Hellenistic empires, while their western offshoot, Punic, endured in North Africa into late antiquity.