Proto-Sinaitic

The world's first alphabet, created around 1900–1500 BC by Semitic miners in Sinai who simplified Egyptian hieroglyphs. They used a revolutionary principle called acrophony: each sign represents the first consonant of the object depicted ("aleph"=ox head, "beth"=house). This reduced thousands of hieroglyphs to just 22 signs. This system is the ultimate ancestor of all alphabets — Phoenician → Greek → Latin → Arabic → Hebrew — and roughly 70% of humanity today writes in its descendants.