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Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Happy Saturday. Today we are jumping back to

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Speaker 1: an episode that was inspired by a trip I took

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Speaker 1: to Epcot. But don't worry if you're not into theme

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Speaker 1: park things. It is in no way about anything Disney. Nope.

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Speaker 1: It is about the origins of the Phoenician alphabet and

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Speaker 1: how that failed a communication gap for merchants when it

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Speaker 1: was invented. So let's just hop right in. Welcome to

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Speaker 1: Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works

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Speaker 1: dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly

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Speaker 1: Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we're talking

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Speaker 1: about a piece of history that touches most people, and

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Speaker 1: probably most people that are listening to this podcast. Uh

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Speaker 1: in English, yes, but it also touches many other languages,

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Speaker 1: and that is the Phoenician alphabet. And it actually um

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Speaker 1: I was inspired to research this a little bit because

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Speaker 1: last time I was in Epcot and I was writing

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Speaker 1: Spaceship Earth, which, for anyone who doesn't know that Big

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Speaker 1: g d s sphere in the middle of the front

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Speaker 1: of the park that's kind of their icon. There's actually

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Speaker 1: a ride in that. It's a very gentle and calm

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Speaker 1: but air conditioned, which is important, and you get to

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Speaker 1: sit down for a lot ride yes, through sort of

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Speaker 1: the history of man and how we've evolved communications and

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Speaker 1: our communication methods. And the ride broke down as we

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Speaker 1: were just adjacent to the Phoenician tradership and so for

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Speaker 1: and it was a long and unusually long breakdown, So

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Speaker 1: for like fifteen to twenty minutes, I just kept hearing

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Speaker 1: over and over Dame Judy Dench saying, remember how easy

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Speaker 1: it was to learn your A, B c's. Thank the Phoenicians,

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Speaker 1: they invented them. So after you hear that a hundred times,

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Speaker 1: you start to think you should thank the Phoenicians and

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Speaker 1: do some research. And that is how we landed here,

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Speaker 1: sort of imagining you in an no TV and no

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Speaker 1: beer make home or something something moment inside of Spaceship Earth. Well,

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Speaker 1: to be fair, I really do love that ride, and

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Speaker 1: I love watching the animatronics, and I kind of enjoy it,

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Speaker 1: but it did sort of eventually bore into my brain

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Speaker 1: and make me want to do some more research. Um So,

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Speaker 1: just for a little background on the Phoenicians. Uh, Phoenicia

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Speaker 1: was situated on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, so

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Speaker 1: along the coast of modern day Syria and Palestine and

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Speaker 1: including the lands of modern day Lebanon, but they were

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Speaker 1: pretty coastal. Their actual land wasn't very expansive, which is

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Speaker 1: likely why they turned to the sea and life as

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Speaker 1: merchants for most of their um income and sort of

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Speaker 1: well being. So while today the Phoenicians may be known

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Speaker 1: most for their alphabet, they innovated in other ways as well,

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Speaker 1: and one of my favorites is UH. They knew how

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Speaker 1: to make purple dye, which most people who have studied

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Speaker 1: history at all know is kind of a huge deal. Um.

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Speaker 1: It's a big textile advancement. They were actually known for

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Speaker 1: making some pretty impressive textiles. In the earliest example of

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Speaker 1: their production of this, so called royal purple, which is

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Speaker 1: a dye that was actually worse more than its way

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Speaker 1: in gold, was found in the excavations of the thirteenth

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Speaker 1: century BC levels of Um, the Phoenician city of Surrepta

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Speaker 1: in Lebanon, and incidentally UH and related to this, we

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Speaker 1: don't really know what the Phoenicians called themselves. The name

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Speaker 1: is actually Greek in origin, and it's believed to signify

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Speaker 1: the color purple red that they were known for making.

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Speaker 1: Just kind of interesting. So the dye was so important

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Speaker 1: they named the whole people after. Yeah, it was a

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Speaker 1: huge part of their culture that that was one of

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Speaker 1: the things they had innovated. Some accounts even credit the

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Speaker 1: Phoenicians with the discovery of glassmaking, and I read a

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Speaker 1: few different versions of how that was discovered, which is

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Speaker 1: why I qualify as some accounts, Uh they are. I mean,

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Speaker 1: they did make glass, but whether they actually discovered it

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Speaker 1: or picked it up and then refined it. Some historians

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Speaker 1: argue about, Yeah, I should have asked the boyfriend. Oh yeah,

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Speaker 1: because he's a pro it um, yes at how these

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Speaker 1: things come to be, has a degree in glass science. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: ask him and we'll get back to that one. But

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Speaker 1: they were also really great shipmakers and sailors, and according

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Speaker 1: to legend, one of their greatest sort of accomplishments in

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Speaker 1: terms of um seafaring was at the request of the

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Speaker 1: Egyptian king Necho too, and they circumvented or circumnavigated rather

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Speaker 1: Africa in six d b C. Which is huge. I mean,

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Speaker 1: that's a long journey, and uh, most accounts suggest that

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Speaker 1: they actually stopped at one point and made land and

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Speaker 1: lived on the land for a little while and got

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Speaker 1: some crops going to sort of refill the boats. It

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Speaker 1: seems like some sort of restocking would have been necessary

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Speaker 1: just for what it takes to support people on a boat. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: And in two thousand and eight there was a reproduction

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Speaker 1: built of a Phoenician ship up and it actually sailed

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Speaker 1: the same course. And that's like a twenty thousand mile voyage,

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Speaker 1: so that's long, and it took that modern vessel two years.

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Speaker 1: Uh So presumably you would have run out of supplies

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Speaker 1: in a two year period and would have had to restock. Um.

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Speaker 1: There are actually some historians who suspect that the Phoenicians

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Speaker 1: traveled all the way to North America, although that is

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Speaker 1: argued in UM in history circles controversial idea. Yeah, there's

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Speaker 1: a March CNN article about the possibility, and in it

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Speaker 1: they interviewed geology professor Dr Mark mcmanimum of Mount Holyoke

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Speaker 1: College and he mentions that they're actually Phoenician coins that

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Speaker 1: are inscribed with maps of the Old and New worlds,

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Speaker 1: which supports this idea that they did in fact make

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Speaker 1: it to the America's at some point. UM and the

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Speaker 1: same group that recreated that UM circumnavigation of Africa is

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Speaker 1: currently raising funds to sail that same ship across the

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Speaker 1: Atlantic and try to see if that was true really possible,

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Speaker 1: because unlike where they went around Africa and they could

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Speaker 1: kind of pull in and stop, there's nowhere to pull in.

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Speaker 1: There's no um, there's no rest stop between between there

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Speaker 1: and and here. Yeah, the idea of going they could

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Speaker 1: find islands, but that that's kind of a little bit

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Speaker 1: of a long shot. Yeah. Well, and the idea of

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Speaker 1: going across the whole Atlantic Ocean in a little tiny boat,

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Speaker 1: it's kind of terrifying to me. It's not so tiny,

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Speaker 1: it's certainly not a cruise ship, but it's um. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: if I'm traveling across the whole Atlantic, I kind of

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Speaker 1: want there to be you know, a flighting city lifeboat

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Speaker 1: and and a safety drill before we leave about how

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Speaker 1: to get into the life boats. Yeah. I mean, I'm

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Speaker 1: sure I haven't read a lot about this particular plan,

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Speaker 1: but I'm sure they have support crew always at the

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Speaker 1: ready because they are hooked up to like GPS and stuff.

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Speaker 1: They traded all over the Mediterranean and parts beyond, and

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Speaker 1: their culture is recognized as the first real globalized business,

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Speaker 1: which is pretty cool. And about the alphabet, so prior

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Speaker 1: to this alphabet, the Phoenicians were using a quine formed script,

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Speaker 1: just like the rest of Mespotamia was. The roots of

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Speaker 1: the Phoenician alphabet are in the fifteenth century BC and

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Speaker 1: what's sometimes referred to as the Proto Canaanite or Proto

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Speaker 1: Synetic alphabet. The earliest examples of Phoenician writing date back

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Speaker 1: to b C, and their inscriptions found in the city

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Speaker 1: of Biblos, and it is no accident that Biblos is

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Speaker 1: also the root word for BiblioTech and Bible and bibliography

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Speaker 1: exactly all of the book related words. Uh. If you

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Speaker 1: were to look at a linguistic family tree of alphabets,

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Speaker 1: Phoenician would be really close to the base. And because

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Speaker 1: the Phoenicians traded with so many other cultures, their form

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Speaker 1: of written communications spread really quickly and really widely. Most

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Speaker 1: other alphabets can actually be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet.

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Speaker 1: So the direct descendants of it include Aramaic, Etruscan, Archaic, Greek,

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Speaker 1: Old Hebrew, and Proto Arabic, and there's also even some

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Speaker 1: influence in Indian and East Asian language. Only consonants are

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Speaker 1: represented in the Phoenician alphabet, there are no vowels. This

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Speaker 1: is also called an ab jod alphabet. It made me

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Speaker 1: think of when I was researching it, when you see

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Speaker 1: people's license plates that just have, you know, a very

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Speaker 1: reduced version of a word and you have to kind

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Speaker 1: of fill in the vowels. Because initially I was like,

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Speaker 1: how did that work? But that was kind of my

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Speaker 1: modern ticket into how that might function. Were old real

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Speaker 1: estate listings for the Internet when you only had so

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Speaker 1: many column entes in the newspaper. Uh, and they are

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Speaker 1: actually only twenty two letters, and those letters can be

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Speaker 1: traced back to hieroglyphs in many cases, so their form

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Speaker 1: and even um. There's often in some historical accounts kind

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Speaker 1: of a flow chart of how like this word for

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Speaker 1: ox turned into this shape, which turned into this letter

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Speaker 1: which has similar sound or whatever. Um, So there it is.

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Speaker 1: It was born of these other things, but it filled

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Speaker 1: a void of sound based alphabet. Generally, Phoenician was written

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Speaker 1: from right to left, but in some instances it was

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Speaker 1: written in a bustropheten style, which means that it would

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Speaker 1: alternate direction once. One line would be written from right

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Speaker 1: to left and the next from left to right. The

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Speaker 1: alternating direction would continue, so somebody reading the language could

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Speaker 1: read their way down a passage of text without ever

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Speaker 1: having to jump visually to the start of a new line,

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Speaker 1: which as a child, I just wondered why that was

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Speaker 1: not how we did it. Well. It has been tried, apparently,

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Speaker 1: but most mostly Phoenician, to the best of my knowledge,

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Speaker 1: does go from right to left, and you do have

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Speaker 1: to do the jump, just like we do in our

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Speaker 1: left to right reading of English. There were also not

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Speaker 1: normally araces between words, which seems a little bit crazy,

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Speaker 1: I think to the modern mind. But there were sometimes

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Speaker 1: dots to distinguish words, and sometimes there were vertical slashes

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Speaker 1: like a vertical stroke. But eventually spaces did come into play,

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Speaker 1: and by the sixth century BC, spaces were becoming more

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Speaker 1: common than the dots are the vertical strokes to create

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Speaker 1: word separation. The Phoenician numeral system was also written from

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Speaker 1: right to left, and it bears a resemblance to the

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Speaker 1: Roman numeral system. It combines symbols to create complex numbers

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Speaker 1: a lot like Roman numerals do. Yeah, and much of

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Speaker 1: the Old Testament was originally written down using the Phoenician

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Speaker 1: alphabet because there weren't really any other options in the

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Speaker 1: way of a standardized writing system at the time that

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Speaker 1: was an actual alphabet and not pictogram So why did

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Speaker 1: the Phoenicians want to create an alphabet in the first place.

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Speaker 1: There is a very short answer for this book. Yes

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Speaker 1: they were um. They were training Roman scholar Pliny the

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Speaker 1: Elder is credited with defining the Phoenicians as the first

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Speaker 1: traveling salesman, and Pliny the Elder gets a little bit

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Speaker 1: of um a grain of salt with anything you read.

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Speaker 1: He was apparently given to exaggeration, and he was very

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Speaker 1: very pro Phoenician like, he really admired that culture. But

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Speaker 1: it is pretty widely accepted that he was accurate in

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Speaker 1: this characterization of them um because they were traveling all

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Speaker 1: over the place and their entire culture was really based

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Speaker 1: on trade. So, as we mentioned, they traveled all over

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Speaker 1: the Mediterranean and maybe even the globe. The goal of

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Speaker 1: the new alphabet was to create a system that would

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Speaker 1: be easy to learn and understand by their business associates.

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Speaker 1: And before this written communication had been pretty pictogram based.

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Speaker 1: It was so diversified that different societies could not share

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Speaker 1: written information and have everyone know what the symbols meant so,

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Speaker 1: the Phoenicians found this way to break words down into

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Speaker 1: characters with different sounds that could be combined to create

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Speaker 1: any number of words. Because this was a written codification

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Speaker 1: of sound instead of pictograms, it was easily adaptable to

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Speaker 1: multiple languages. And because this alphabet was invented to record

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Speaker 1: and track trades, the alphabet itself sort of became traded. Uh.

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Speaker 1: It was the language of business transactions, but it also

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Speaker 1: got adopted for general use because it filled this void

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Speaker 1: of systemized writing that was again not pictogram based, that

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Speaker 1: people could pick up pretty easily. And let's let's see

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Speaker 1: more easily transliterate other language exactly. Cadmus, the Phoenician, is

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Speaker 1: giving credit for introducing the alphabet of his people to

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Speaker 1: the Greeks, as told in the writings of Herodotus and

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Speaker 1: Herodotus says, the Phoenicians who came with Cadmus introduced into

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Speaker 1: Greece after their settlement in the country a number of accomplishments,

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Speaker 1: of which the most important was writing and art till then,

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Speaker 1: I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first, they used

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Speaker 1: the same characters as all the other Phoenicians, but as

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Speaker 1: time went on and they changed their language. They also

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Speaker 1: changed the shape of their letters. At that period, most

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Speaker 1: of the Greeks in the neighborhood were Ionians. They were

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Speaker 1: taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them with

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Speaker 1: a few alterations for their own use, continuing to refer

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Speaker 1: to them as the Phoenician characters, as was only right

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Speaker 1: as the Phoenicians had introduced them, so even though it

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Speaker 1: had evolved, they still attributed its um the alphabet to

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Speaker 1: the Phoenicians. We should point out that even though this

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Speaker 1: was a defined writing system, there were variations on the

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Speaker 1: alphabet in different Phoenician colonies cypro Phoenician, Sardinian, and the

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Speaker 1: Punic and Neo Punic, which is the cursive version of

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Speaker 1: Punic versions founding Carthage. The Carthage versions of the alphabets

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Speaker 1: continued to be used until about the third century CE,

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Speaker 1: and with the development of this new written alphabet also

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Speaker 1: came new ways of writing, so it kind of catalyzed

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Speaker 1: a whole new age of communication, and wax tablets came

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Speaker 1: into being where they could um imprint letters into the wax. Pens, ink, papyrus, parchment,

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Speaker 1: and eventually paper kind of all came from this development.

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Speaker 1: So it was a very rapid gross element in the

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Speaker 1: world of communication. In three thirty two BC, Alexander the

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Speaker 1: Great put Phoenicia under Greek control, and then in one

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Speaker 1: BC Roamed demolished Carthage after pursuing Hannibal. There after the

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Speaker 1: Second Punic War, and what was left of Phoenicia became

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Speaker 1: part of the Roman Empire. And ironically, very few instances

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Speaker 1: of Phoenician writings actually remain. The papyrus that they often

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Speaker 1: wrote on, and some of those early forms of paper

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Speaker 1: has really not survived terribly well. What we know mostly

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Speaker 1: is from other cultures writing about how awesome the Phoenicians

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Speaker 1: were and about their alphabet and its development. Um. The

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Speaker 1: oldest surviving Phoenician writing example, which we briefly mentioned earlier,

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Speaker 1: is in Biblos, and it's on the sarcophagus of King

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Speaker 1: high Riem and it's dated at approximately And most of

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Speaker 1: what we know, like I said, has actually come from

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Speaker 1: the writings of the Greeks. So even though the Phoenicians

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Speaker 1: have kind of there's a little bit of a shroud

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Speaker 1: of um lack of information around them from them, other

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Speaker 1: cultures wrote about them enough that we know about them.

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Speaker 1: So now if you're stuck in Spaceship Earth. You'll know,

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Speaker 1: thank the Phoenicians even to them. Also, the way that

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Speaker 1: Dame Judy Dench says that is so charming that I

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Speaker 1: will never ever forget it. It's pretty awesome. It's because

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Speaker 1: Dame Judy Dinch is awesome. Yeah, she is. Prior to her,

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Speaker 1: it was Walter Cronkite that narrated that ride, but then

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Speaker 1: they updated it a few years back and she took

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Speaker 1: it over and did a beautiful job. Thank you so

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Speaker 1: much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this

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Speaker 1: is out of the archive, if you heard an email

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Speaker 1: address or a Facebook U r L or something similar

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Speaker 1: during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now,

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Speaker 1: so here is our current contact information. We are at

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Speaker 1: History Podcasts at how stuff works dot com, and then

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Speaker 1: we're at Missed in the History. All over social media,

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Speaker 1: that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.

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Speaker 1: Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands

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Speaker 1: of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.