The credit for devising the first real alphabet goes to the Phoenicians. Phoenicia was the coastal territory of the area which we now call Syria and Lebanon. The Phoenicians – or the Canaanites as they called themselves – lived on commerce along the coasts of the Mediterranean. They left us no poetry or prose works but records of business transactions and inventories of natural resources. Papyrus from Egypt was one of the things in which they traded.

Merchants from Byblos, the religious capital of Phoenicia, (which gave the Greeks their name for "book" / from which the word "book" in Greek was derived) bought papyrus and resold it to other peoples in the Middle East. In doing this, they learnt how to use Egyptian characters, but it would be wrong to say that the Phoenician alphabet directly derives from the Egyptian way of writing; other elements must have played their part.

The Phoenicians may have been influenced by the way of writing used by the people of Crete island which was on their trading routes. There is a similarity between Cretan and Phoenician symbols, but it may also be true that the Phoenicians borrowed from the Cuneiform handwriting used by the inland peoples of the Near East.
 
The two Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon devised a different style of writing and slightly different alphabet. Inland tribes used the alphabet of Tyre. After the Trojan wars, the Greeks borrowed it. It probably came into existence in about the 12th century b.c. when Tyre had great importance in the Mediterranean world. The alphabet consisted of consonants only. As for vowels, they were left to the reader to add.

When it was taken by the Greeks, they found it necessary to use vowel symbols to avoid confusion; hence, they adapted some of the original consonants to suit that purpose. They also added some letters of their own invention and produced an alphabet of 24 letters. The very word "alphabet" itself is derived directly from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beta). The Greeks, in their turn, took these two letters from the Phoenician "Aleph and Beth".