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The Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets developed in the wake of the Bronze Age collapse, out of their immediate predecessor script Proto-Canaanite (Late Proto-Sinaitic) during the 13th to 12th centuries BCE, and earlier Proto-Sinaitic scripts.
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.
The Phoenician alphabet is a consonantal alphabet (or abjad) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BCE. It was the first mature alphabet, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region.
The Serabit el-Khadim proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are about 30 early alphabetic inscriptions in proto-Sinaitic script found at or in the vicinity of Serabit el-Khadim on the Sinai Peninsula.
Proto-Canaanite, also referred to as Proto-Canaan, Old Canaanite, or Canaanite, is the name given to either a script ancestral to the Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew script with undefined affinity to Proto-Sinaitic, or to the Proto-Sinaitic script (c. 16th century BC), when found in Canaan.
In the light of present information, the origin of the alphabet appears as the culmination of developments which took place in the Levant, where both Egyptian, and Mesopotamian (cuneiform) writing were known and occasionally used from the third millennium B.C. onwards.
Sinaitic inscriptions, archaeological remains that are among the earliest examples of alphabetic writing; they were inscribed on stones in the Sinai Peninsula, where they were first discovered in 1904–05 by the British archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie. Apparently influenced both by Egyptian.
