Phoenicia

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Authored entries

Wikipedia: Phoenicia (edited and excerpted)

Phoenicia was an ancient civilization with its heartland along the coastal plain of what is now Lebanon and Syria. In archeological terms Phoenicians were actually Canaanites and the two should not be considered as separate people along the coasts of the Levant. After a period of Egyptian domination in the area, the high point of Phoenician power is usually placed circa 1200 800 BCE. However, the first appearance in archaeology of cultural elements clearly identifiable with that period is sometimes dated as early as the third millennium BCE. Phoenician civilization was an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread right across the Mediterranean during the first century BCE. Though ancient boundaries fluctuated, the southern city of Sarepta, between Sidon and Tyre, is the most thoroughly excavated city of the Phoenician homeland. The name Phoenicia derives from the Greek name for the area, Phoiník?. The Torah refers to the Phoenicians as Canaanites. In various texts, they are the mysterious "Sea People."

The Phoenicians spoke the Phoenician language, and later Punic. In addition to their many inscriptions, the Phoenicians, contrary to some reports, wrote many books which have not survived. Evangelical Preparation by Eusebius of Caesarea quotes extensively from Philo of Byblos and Sanchuniathon. Further, the Phoenician Punic colonies of North Africa continued to be a source of knowledge about the Phoenicians. Saint Augustine AKA "The Killer of Fun" (who spoke Punic, and calls it "our language") refers to their books as containing much wisdom. Torah scribes did not like it when a princess from Phoenicia became Queen Jezebel of Israel and introduced the worship of her gods. Queen Jezebel was the great-aunt of Dido-Elissar who founded Carthage out of which came Hannibal.

Wikipedia: History and diffusion of alphabets

The first alphabet that has been recovered was developed in central Egypt around 2000 BCE. Until 1999 CE it was generally accepted that the first alphabet originated some 300-500 years later. Alphabetic material was uncovered at Serabit el-Khadem in Sinai in 1905 and at Ugarit in Syria in 1929. Dating was disputed but put in the period of 1800 to 1500 BCE, the archaeologist Alan Gardiner in "The Egyptian Origins of the Semitic Alphabet" (1916) set the tone for much of the future debate. However, in the 1990s studies by John Darnell of rock carvings at Wadi el-Holi, have pushed the creation of the alphabet back to 2000 BCE and placed its origin with Semitic workers within Egyptian society.

The inventors took Egyptian hieroglyphs and applied new names and phonetic sounds to the images, initially to represent the consonant sounds of a Semitic language. It was inherited by the Canaanites and Phoenicians, and nearly all subsequent alphabets are derived from it or inspired by it, directly or indirectly. These early Semitic alphabets, as well as their descendant Semitic alphabets, including the modern Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, are strictly speaking abjads, lacking symbols for vowel sounds. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved in the 7th century BCE, is the ancestor to most of the alphabets of Asia. The Arabic alphabet is descended from the Aramaic via the Nabatean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan. The Pahlavi alphabet was adapted for writing middle Persian, and is the ancestor of the Armenian alphabet, which is also influenced by the Greek alphabet. The Syriac alphabet was used by Syrian Christians after the 3rd century CE, and was adapted to create the alphabets of northern Asia, including the Sogdian, Manichean, Uighur, Mongolian, and Manchu alphabets.

The Aramaic alphabet was probably also the ancestor of the Brahmic alphabets of India, which spread to Southeast Asia and Indonesia with the spread of Buddhism and Hinduism. China, Korea, and Japan also absorbed Buddhism but maintained their own logographic and syllabic scripts. The Brahmic alphabets are abugidas, where each letter represents a consonant and vowel combination; the vowel sound is modified using diacritic marks above the letters.

The Greek alphabet was derived from the Phoenician alphabet with the innovation of separate symbols for vowels (Semitic did not need them). Most subsequent alphabets with vowels are derived from the early Greek alphabets. The alphabets of Europe, including the Roman alphabet and its descendants and the Cyrillic alphabet, developed for the eastern Slavic languages, and the runic alphabets are all themselves descended from the Greek alphabet. In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is often used for any modern derivation from the alphabet used by the Romans (the Roman alphabet), especially when contrasted with an alphabet or writing system not descended from the Roman alphabet. These Latin alphabets generally drop some of the letters of the classical Latin alphabet or add additional letters.

The most popular Latin alphabet in use today is the 26-letter alphabet normally used for English, French, and German which is also employed for codes devised for international standards:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z

(The ligatures Æ, , and ß when used in English, French, or German are normally not counted as separate alphabetic letters but as variants of AE, OE and ss respectively. Letters bearing diacritics are also not counted as separate letters in these languages. This is often not the case for Æ and and some letters bearing diacritics in other variations of the Latin alphabet.)

Wikipedia: Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet dates from around 1000 BCE and is a direct descendant of the Proto-Sinatic alphabet. It was used by the Phoenicians to write Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. Modern alphabets thought to have descended from the Phoenician include Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Latin. Like Proto-Sinatic, Arabic and Hebrew, Phoenician is a consonantal alphabet (an abjad), and contains no symbols for vowel sounds, which had to be deduced from context.

Phoenician inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos (in present-day Lebanon) and Carthage (in present-day Tunisia).

The Alphabet

Letter	Name	Meaning	Transliteration	Corresponding letter in
Hebrew	Arabic	Greek	Latin
[35px	Aleph](/35px-aleph)	āleph	ox	ʾ
[35px	Beth](/35px-beth)	bēth	house	b
[35px	Gimel](/35px-gimel)	gīmel	camel	g
[35px	Daleth](/35px-daleth)	dāleth	door	d
[35px	He](/35px-he)	hē	window	h
[35px	Waw](/35px-waw)	wāw	hook	w
[35px	Zayin](/35px-zayin)	zayin	weapon	z
[35px	Heth](/35px-heth)	ḥēth	fence	ḥ
[35px	Teth](/35px-teth)	ṭēth	?	ṭ
[35px	Yodh](/35px-yodh)	yōdh	arm	y
[35px	Kaph](/35px-kaph)	kaph	palm	k
[35px	Lamedh](/35px-lamedh)	lāmedh	goad	l
[35px	Mem](/35px-mem)	mēm	water	m
[35px	Nun](/35px-nun)	nun	fish	n
[35px	Samekh](/35px-samekh)	sāmekh	fish	s
[35px	Ayin](/35px-ayin)	ayin	eye	ʿ
[35px	Pe](/35px-pe)	pē	mouth	p
[35px	Sade](/35px-sade)	ṣādē	erudite one	ṣ
[35px	Qoph](/35px-qoph)	qōph	monkey	q
[35px	Res](/35px-res)	rē	head	r
[35px	Sin](/35px-sin)	in	tooth
[35px	Taw](/35px-taw)	tāw	mark	t

Comments

The meanings given are of the letter names in Phoenician. The original Proto-Sinatic letters used to be pictograms, though some of the name meanings had changed by the time of Phoenician. For example, the character gimel may have originally been the image of a throwing stick
As the letters were originally carved into stone, most are square and straight, like characters from the runic alphabet, although more cursive versions are increasingly attested in later times, culminating in the Neo-Punic alphabet of Roman-era North Africa.
Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are some texts written in boustrophedon (consecutive lines in alternate directions – literally, as the ox turns, a reference to the way an ox turns at the end ploughing a furrow and carries on the next furrow in the opposite direction).
Various letters have alternative representations: e.g. the taw can be written more like a '+' than like a 'x', the heth can have two cross bars.
The Greek letters given in brackets are archaic and may not render in some fonts (see Greek alphabet for details).
The Latin letter X derives from a western Greek pronunciation of chi (Greek letter)|chi, and not from the Phoenician-inspired letter xi.

Encoding

The Phoenician script has been accepted for encoding in Unicode in the range U+10900 to U+1091F. An alternative proposal to handle it as a font variation of Hebrew was turned down. (See PDF summary.)