The world's first alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians, ancient inhabitants of modern-day Lebanon. Consisting of 22 letters, all consonants, the Phoenician alphabet was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is a local variant of the Phoenician alphabetical script. The Aramaic alphabet is another descendant of Phoenician, widely adopted as Aramaic was a common language spoken throughout the Middle East; Arabic script evolved from Phoenician via Aramaic. The Greek alphabet (and by extension its descendants, such as Latin, Cyrillic, Runic, and Coptic) was also derived from Phoenician.

As the letters were originally incised with a stylus, most of the shapes are angular and straight, and Phoenician was usually written from right to left. The alphabet's success was due in part to its phonetic nature; Phoenician was the first widely used script in which one sound was represented by one symbol, which meant that there were only a few dozen symbols to learn. This simple system contrasted with the other scripts in use at the time, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, which employed many complex characters and were difficult to learn.

Another reason for its success was the maritime trading culture of Phoenician merchants, which spread the use of the alphabet into parts of North Africa and Europe. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as the Lebanese city of Byblos and Carthage in North Africa. 

Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. Its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of writing systems only being learned and employed by members of the royal and religious hierarchies of society, who used writing as an instrument of power to control access to information by the larger population. The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms, such as Assyria, Babylonia and Adiabene, would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the Common Era.

When alphabetic writing began in Greece, the letter forms used were similar but not identical to the Phoenician ones and vowels were added because the Phoenician alphabet did not contain any vowels. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact match to Greek sounds were used.