Modern historians have come to believe thatThe original land of the Phoenicians is the territory of present-day Libya. The Phoenicians were a skillful people in the military and in peace, they built a developed state and invented one of the first alphabets. Born merchants, they were able to build strong and large ships, on which they crossed the seas and, according to some sources, even the oceans.
Who were the Phoenicians?
Until now, there is no consensus about the people of Phoenicians. Having no state of their own, they sailed across the Mediterranean and seized small patches of territory from which an empire later arose.
Исторические хроники разных народов описывают их then unscrupulous swindlers and boors, unsurpassed merchants and strategists who, unable to dominate their state, rule the whole world.
The origin of the Phoenicians still remainsthe secret. According to biblical sources, the Phoenicians are descended from Ham. For insulting his father, he and his descendants should have been forever in the service of the Israelites. The nation itself considered the progenitor of the god Henna, the son of Baal, to be its progenitor.
Финикийцы возили свои товары по всему Mediterranean, their ships were often in the waters of the Indian and Atlantic Ocean. The Canaanites knew many languages and maintained contacts with the ancient Greeks and Etruscans. Their culture and language survived until the Middle Ages, and only after the Arab conquest did the people begin to lose their identity and adopt the Arabic languages.
Phoenicians laid the foundation of writingalmost all the languages of modern Europe. So what are the advantages of the Phoenician alphabet over other writing systems? Why did the phonetic alphabet become the basis for the development of writing of the Greeks and Romans?
How did the letters of the Phoenician alphabet
It is believed that the phonetic alphabet of the Phoenicians appeared in the 2nd millennium BC. e. An image of the alphabet along with the names and transcriptions is given below.
Acquainted with the illustration, students findmuch in common with modern writing. Many have a question about how many letters in the Phoenician alphabet were consonants, and how many vowels. In the Phoenician alphabet, all 22 letters were consonants. The sequence and the names of the letters were already determined and mandatory when studying.
Phoenician letters acquired their appearance as a result of modifications of well-known graphic symbols. The possible path of such transformations is clearly seen in the example of the letter Aleph.
Primitive graphic for ox withover time has become the image of the modern vowel "A" in the alphabets of the languages of the Romance-Germanic group. Most likely, such a simple and understandable principle of the appearance of letters was the answer to the question of the advantages of the Phoenician alphabet over others.
What did the Phoenicians write about?
The Phoenicians used papyrus and vegetable paints as a basis for writing. This was the cause of so little information that modern scientists have about this amazing people.
Perhaps we would not have come to no evidenceachievements of the Canaanites, if not the Greeks. Further, due to close trade relations, the Phoenicians adopted the Greek stylus and began to write on the vacations tablets and make inscriptions on the stones in the later temples and tombs. If you carefully consider the photos of the inscriptions made on the stones, you can find another answer to the question of what are the advantages of the Phoenician alphabet.
Even despite the past tense, the recordingspreserved very clearly. All the letters in the Phoenician alphabet, as many as they are, are simple and convenient for both memorizing and quick writing, which was important for merchants. The text is legible, and the letters are so easy to draw that distort them very difficult.
Borrowing the letters of the Phoenician alphabet by other nations
The similarity of the letters of the alphabets can be seen onAn example of character entries "Vinca". For the first time, these symbols were found near the town of Vinca (near Belgrade), and later in Greece, Romania, Hungary, Moldova, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia.
На изображении приведены и сопоставлены буквы из various sources. Column 3 is the Phoenician inscriptions, and column 6 is the letters from Vinca. The above-mentioned advantages of the Phoenician alphabet, in which there is no doubt, caused the borrowing of the phonetic letters by other peoples who came into contact with the Canaanite people.
Matches of the Phoenician and Etruscan alphabet
People who do not find a match betweenBy writing Phoenicians and Etruscans, perhaps you should visit the office of the ophthalmologist. Coincidences not only in writing characters, but also in the names of many letters speak for themselves.
The comparative table in column 1 showsPhoenician alphabet times 2 thousand BC. e., in column 2 are reflected letters, column 3 is the Etruscan alphabet of the 8th century BC. e., in column 4 shows the Byzantine uni-tial, column 5 is Cyrillic. To the left and right of the table are transcriptions of sounds and the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet in Russian and English.
