<P> The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt . Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals, to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker . These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names . </P> <P> In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto - Sinaitic script appears in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula dated to circa the 15th century BC, apparently left by Canaanite workers . In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell discovered an even earlier version of this first alphabet at Wadi el - Hol dated to circa 1800 BC and showing evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to circa 2000 BC, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had been developed about that time . Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs . This script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded . An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate the following vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC . This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit . </P> <P> The Proto - Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called "Proto - Canaanite" before ca . 1050 BC . The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram . This script is the parent script of all western alphabets . By the tenth century, two other forms can be distinguished, namely Canaanite and Aramaic . The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew script . The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended . Vowelless alphabets, which are not true alphabets, are called abjads, currently exemplified in scripts including Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac . The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution and some "weak" consonants are sometimes used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable (matres lectionis). These letters have a dual function since they are also used as pure consonants . </P> <P> The Proto - Sinaitic or Proto - Canaanite script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B . The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn . Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically . </P>

Where did the letters of the alphabet come from