"Why did the Phoenician merchants need writing?" - you ask. Let's understand the Phoenician language in more detail.
Phoenician writing is one of the most ancient in the world. Its appearance dates back to the 15th century BC. It was the first phonetic and alphabetic writing, that is, one that uses letters that have a definite and fixed sound, and sometimes even a meaning.
How did Phoenician writing come about?
The appearance of Phoenician writing is connected not only with the separation of the Phoenicians from the Middle Eastern ethnic group, but also with the occupation of the Phoenicians themselves.
From time immemorial they were merchants, so writing, one might say, grew out of their line of work. Why did the Phoenician traders need writing? Everything is very simple - in order to record and describe goods, conduct your financial transactions, and also conclude agreements with your partners: Greeks, Arabs, Romans, Egyptians, as well as with other civilizations of the ancient world.
What is the difference between Phoenician writing andothers?
The writing of the ancient Phoenicians absorbed the properties of many of its linguistic "relatives". On the one hand, it is alphabetic-phonetic, that is, each letter represents some kind of fixed sound, from which, in turn, words are composed. It was this principle that the Greeks adopted for their alphabet, and then the Romans, creating the ancient Greek and Latin alphabets, respectively, which gave rise to all modern European languages.
On the other hand, each letter of the Phoenician alphabet carries a specific and constant lexical meaning, for example, the first letter (read as "a") has the meaning "bull". Thus, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic tradition played a huge role in the formation of Phoenician writing, where each letter is assigned an exclusively specific lexical meaning, which does not change regardless of the context in which this or that character is used.
So why did the Phoenician merchants need writing? First of all, to communicate with your neighbors.
The current state of the Phoenician alphabet
Today, the Phoenician script is used exclusively for scientific purposes, because the Phoenician ethnic group ceased to exist a long time ago and assimilated first with the Greeks, then with the Arabs and Jews, and then with the Turks. However, it is worth noting that the Phoenician language was not lost, the records made in it were preserved in the form of inscribed clay and gold tablets.
Thus, we learned the history of the emergence of Phoenician writing, and also why Phoenician traders needed writing.
