What was the most important contribution of the Phoenicians to our civilization? Purple dye Their alphabet Founding of Carthage Sailing vessels

Answer 1

The Phoenicians were a remarkable people. Their maritime skills were matched only by their willingness to sail into previously unexplored seas. Motivated by their desire for profit, they transplanted the civilization originating in the Fertile Crescent of the Ancient Near East to the shores of the Western half of the Mediterranean.

Yet, by far the most important contribution of the Phoenicians to civilization was the system of writing they developed. It was in the city of Ugarit, located north of Phoenicia, that an alphabet of between twenty-five and thirty letters - each representing a sound produced by the human voice - was developed. It was this alphabet upon which the Phoenicians based their own writing system, an alphabet of twenty-two consonants.

In turn, the Ancient Greeks, who recognized the utility of this system, adopted it and improved upon it by adding symbols for vowel sounds. In the colonies established by the Greeks in southern Italy, a version of the Greek alphabet was developed that, in turn, was adopted by the Ancient Romans. It is this alphabet that I am using right now.

What made the Phoenician alphabet so special? At the time that the Phoenicians developed their writing system of twenty-two symbols, the standard system of writing in use throughout the Ancient Near East, known as cuneiform (after the Latin word for a wedge), involved pressing into clay tablets with a tool that left a wedge shaped impression. Different combinations of these wedge shaped impressions made up the symbols used to represent both specific items - a tree, a building, a cow... - and sounds made by a human voice. This system of cuneiform used between six and seven hundred different symbols, of which one-hundred and fifty represented sounds.

It's hardly surprising that the number of people within Ancient Near Eastern societies who were able to master reading and writing in a system that used between six and seven hundred symbols was very small. In other words, relying on the cuneiform system meant that the vast majority of people in Ancient Near Eastern society were cut off from the tremendously useful skill of reading and writing, This complicated system of writing made it far more difficult to disseminate information.

By contrast, all one had to do to learn to read and write using the Phoenician and, in turn, Ancient Greek and Roman alphabets was to memorize a small number of symbols. This meant that a far larger percentage of the population in Phoenician, Greek, and Roman societies had access to and could themselves transmit information that was recorded using this small number of symbols - an alphabet that represented the different sounds made by the human voice that, in different combinations, made up the words of a language. This type of alphabet, reflecting its Phoenician origins, is known as a 'Phonetic' alphabet.