5. Day Beirut VII

The invention of the Phoenician Alphabet, the prototype for all alphabets in the world, is the most significant contribution that Lebanon has made to the whole of humanity. The new system, immediately adopted by all nations, gradually gained ground in all fields in the human sciences, including religious matters, in science and in culture. As one Lebanese thinker has said, today's digital inventions would not have been achieved without the alphabet.

Owing to their cultural and economic links with the two major powers at the time, Egypt and Mesopotamia, Phoenicians used both of these nations' writing systems (hieroglyphs and cuneiforms) at the same time; in the thirteenth century B.C., they proceeded by analogy to invent their own alphabet, which then spread quickly throughout both the western and eastern worlds.Read more