Phoenician Alphabet: Did you mean...?

Your vowels were invented in Greece, giving birth to the first "true" alphabet. Watch as your new toga-clad friend turns your consonant abjad into a consonant-vowel alphabet. It's such a useful mapping of letters to sounds that neighbor...

Runes are letters in the runic alphabets of Germanic-speaking peoples, written and read most prominently from at least c. 160 CE onwards in Scandinavia in the Elder Futhark script (until c. 700 CE) and the Younger Futhark - which illuminated...

This white marble anthropoid (human-shaped) coffin shows a male head wearing a Egyptian style headdress. Phoenician art was influenced by many different traditions. Coffins of this Gaeco-Egyptian style have been found in large numbers at...

Home to some of the Middle East’s most majestic ancient ruins, Lebanon has a rich and varied heritage with over 5,000 years of recorded history. Over the millennia, different conquering empires have left their footprints on the architecture...

Canaan was the name of a large and prosperous ancient country (at times independent, at others a tributary to Egypt) located in the Levant region of present-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. It was also known as Phoenicia. The origin...

Script is the written expression of a language. Cuneiform, the first script, was invented in Sumer, Mesopotamia c. 3500 BCE, hieroglyphics sometime prior to the Early Dynastic Period in Egypt (c. 3150-2613 BCE), and Sanskrit in India during...

Greek (Red) and Phoenician (Yellow) colonization between the 8th and the 6th century BC. German placenames.

Two Phoenician coloured glass vessels. 5th-3rd century BCE. (Museum kunst Palast, Dusseldorf)

This ivory plaque is part of the so-called "Nimrud Ivories." The sphinx wears the typical Egyptian Pharaohs' double crown and an apron with cobra. This indicates that the plaque was made by a Phoenician craftsman. From Nimrud (ancient Kalhu...

Phoenician grinning mask, 4th century BCE, found in a grave at San Sperate in Sardinia. Masks like these were used to ward off evil. (Cagliari Museo Archeologico Nazionale)