Greeks created the first alphabet with one sign per sound

Evidence

The Greeks did not learn to write again until much later. This time, they took over an alphabet of fewer than twenty-five letters from the Phoenicians, a Semitic people whose merchant ships, sailing from their cities Tyre and Sidon on the Palestinian coast, reached every island and harbor of the Mediterranean Sea. The Phoenician alphabet consisted of signs for consonants only. The Greeks appropriated their symbols (alpha and beta are meaningless words in Greek, but their Phoenician equivalents, aleph and beth, mean “ox” and “house”), but by assigning some of the letters to the vowels, they created the first efficient alphabet, a letter system that provided one, and only one, sign for each sound in the language. — Homer; Robert Fagles; Bernard Knox, The Odyssey, 11

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the etymological link between Greek letter names and their Phoenician origins (alpha/aleph = ox, beta/beth = house).
• XREF: connects to: Writing transitioned from mnemonic signs to phonetic symbols. — Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, 264

Broader Connections

• Writing transitioned from mnemonic signs to phonetic symbols. #expands (0.75) — Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, 264