Final answer:
The Phoenicians invented the world's first known alphabet around 1100 BCE, marking a significant contribution to written communication. Their simplified alphabet made literacy more accessible, contributing to their commercial success. Their vast trade networks enabled them to spread this alphabet, influencing other cultures, including the Greeks, who added vowel sounds.
Step-by-step explanation:
The Phoenicians, around 1100 BCE, made a significant contribution to written communication by inventing the world's first known alphabet. This alphabet used symbols that represented consonant sounds, and these consonants strung together formed words where vowel sounds were inferred based on the arrangement of the consonants. This simplified alphabet offered a more efficient record-keeping system, making literacy accessible to more people as opposed to just a small group of specialized scribes. This advantage in record-keeping likely contributed to the Phoenicians' commercial success.
The new script was quickly adapted by other cultures such as the Aramaean peoples, the Israelites, and eventually the Greeks around the eighth century BCE. The Greeks made a crucial adaptation by adding vowel sounds to the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenicians widely established their civilization and leap in writing systems through their vast trade networks that linked the entire Mediterranean basin, playing a key role in the proliferation of written communication.
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