Forgotten alphabets

The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the 2nd millennium BCE. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. They selected a small number of those hieroglyphs seen in their Egyptian surroundings.

Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal scripts of the Semitic type, called "abjads", and "true alphabets", the distinguishing criterion being that true alphabets consistently assign letters to both consonants and vowels on an equal basis, while the symbols in a pure abjad stand only for consonants.
The first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets.

Swan, ride, by, TRG, Banks;, May, 1, 2018;, Creative, Commons, , CC0, 1.0