Probably the tool used the most by humans is the tool of writing and the alphabet, which is also probably the most important. It's the story in the book, the message on the letter, the lock on your computer, Etc., but where did it come from? It goes way back to before the Romans and before the Greeks to a period a bit after Mesopotamia.
The first recorded alphabet was the Proto-Semitic alphabet (also called Proto-Canaanite), which borrowed symbols from Egyptian Hieroglyphics. While the Egyptian hieroglyphics came first, the Proto-Semitic alphabet was the first consonantal alphabet. While the Proto-Semitic alphabet borrowed Egyptian symbols, they had different meanings. The consonant for each borrowed symbol was decided by the first consonant of the objects name. Because the Egyptian hieroglyphs only used consonants, the Proto-Semitic alphabet also adopted this trait. The Proto-Semitic alphabet was used by, or inspired the design of, many other nations such as early Greek, South Arabian, possibly Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic and Latin. Latin was the language used by the Roman empire and the Roman alphabet is very similar to the English alphabet used today. Many of the other alphabets listed evolved into modern languages, such as Aramaic which eventually became Hebrew and Arabic, Phoenician became early Greek, Aramaic and old Hebrew but eventually disappeared from widespread use and became the Samaritan Script. While the first alphabet was developed was Proto-Semitic, the first written language was actually found in Mesopotamia, where there were records of trade of livestock and property.
Some societies considered writing to be special and therefore gave it an origin in mythology, like the Egyptians, who contributed the invention of writing to the god Thoth, who they also believe invented speech, science and art, and could turn speech into a material object. The Sumerians said the god Enlil invented writing and the Babylonians say it was the god Nabu, both of which are said to be able to turn speech into objects like Thoth. The Mayans believe writing was invented by the god Itzamna, shaman, sorcerer, creator of the world and inventor of script and time keeping. While Itzamna is credited with the creation of writing, he is not a scribe god like all previous examples.
We think of written language as split into 2 different groups, symbols and letters. Symbols are an icon that represents another object, idea or word, while letters are individual icons with a sound assigned to it that we order in a certain way to create a word. Some people in the past believed that an alphabet was more advanced and efficient than symbols like the ones used in the Chinese language, one of the points being the need to remember many different symbols for every word while an alphabet has a small number of symbols that are easy to remember. However, with an alphabet, it is required to remember many different arrangements of letters to create a word. Letters and symbols aren't as different as they might seem. When someone reads a word, they read it by looking at the whole word and not each individual letter, like the word was a symbol.
The most widely used alphabet today is Latin, which developed from ancient Greek. The ancient Greek alphabet was the first alphabet to assign letters to consonants and vowels. The Greek alphabet was the first "True" alphabet, this being the first time vowels "were accorded equal status" with consonants. As stated before, ancient Greek was based off a form of Phoenician, which was based off the original Semitic alphabet. All modern European scripts are based off of ancient Greek, which means many people around the world use many different versions of the same alphabet.
An example of how an alphabet can be changed by different cultures is also the Greek alphabet. As the Greek alphabet was the first alphabet that included vowels, they needed to change the Phoenician alphabet that they adopted to include these letters. They selected the Phoenician letters they didn't use to represent these vowels. They choose the letters using this rule, that the starting letter and sound of the letter was the sound and letter the symbol represented. As the Greek language didn't use the "H" sound, they changed some symbols meaning, sound and name, i.e. the letter 'alep became alpha and the letter he became e and later renamed epsilon. As time went on, it is probable that the Greeks changed this alphabet over time and it became more their own. In the time of Alexander the great and during the Roman empire the Latin alphabet was in use, but as Romans started to use more Greek words, they needed to change the Latin alphabet to be compatible. When the Anglo-Saxons and Augustine of Canterbury went to Britain in the sixth century, they learned that the symbol wen, which stood for W, was very similar to the Old English letter P. To make sure no one confused W with P, they changed the symbol from a narrow triangular P to double U or UU, but because the U at the time looked like a V, the symbol looked like a double V or VV, and that is why a W doesn't look like a double U (Well, it did at the time). They started to use the round U to symbolize the vowel and the V shaped U to symbolize the consonant. J was also a variation of I at the time. In the 16th century, people began to use the I as the vowel sound and the J as the consonant sound. It was this time that our modern English alphabet was established and this version is the version we still use today.
An alphabet, or any other written language, changed the way people communicate because people could now talk to each other over long distances and keep records of things like time, the amount of crop gathered during a harvest, merchandizing and other important things. Just imagine what life would be like without a way to write things down. Without a written language, humans would never have come as far as we have, but after assessing the situation, a written language was probably inevitability. Without writing and a written language we probably wouldn't have many of the things we have today like computers and similar devices. We wouldn't even have books or similar things. Writing didn't just change the way we communicate. It changed the way we live our lives.
For a short alphabet timeline visit this link
For a short alphabet timeline visit this link
