Researched
Alphabet
A few dozen letters for single sounds replace hundreds of signs; the Phoenician and Greek alphabets make reading learnable in weeks.
Open in the interactive tree →Inscriptions from Sinai around 1800 BC show Semitic speakers turning Egyptian pictures into letters for single sounds. Phoenician traders spread a 22-letter script around the Mediterranean, and the Greeks added vowels around 800 BC. Reading and writing no longer needed years of scribal training, which opened written culture to merchants and ordinary citizens and later made movable type practical.
Prerequisites
- Writing~3200 BC
Unlocks
- Printing Press~1450About 26 letters suit movable type; thousands of characters do not
- Braille1824
- Unicode1991
Sources
More in Foundations of Civilization · Antiquity
- Writing~3200 BC
- Weights & Standard Measures~2500 BC
- Sundial & Water Clock~1500 BC
- Libraries~650 BC
- Philosophy~585 BC
- Plato's Academy387 BC
- Calendar3rd millennium BC
- Paper~105 AD