Every alphabet in the world — Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Korean Hangul — descends from a single writing system invented around 1800 BCE by workers in the Sinai desert. Before that breakthrough, writing was an expert's art. After it, literacy became possible for anyone.

The earliest writing systems, like Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, were logographic. Each symbol represented a word or concept. To be literate, you had to memorize thousands of signs — a skill that took decades of training and was restricted to professional scribes. Writing was a priestly monopoly.

Somewhere in the Egyptian-controlled turquoise mines of Sinai, Semitic-speaking laborers encountered hieroglyphics and had a radical idea: what if you used a hieroglyph not for what it meant, but for the sound of its first letter? The Egyptian hieroglyph for 'ox' — aleph — became the symbol for the 'a' sound. The hieroglyph for 'house' — bet — became 'b'. With about 22 signs, you could write any word in any language.

This was the first alphabet. It didn't spread from priests to the masses; it rose up from the masses. Workers, not scholars, invented the tool that would democratize literacy.

The Phoenicians, master traders of the eastern Mediterranean, adopted and refined this system around 1050 BCE. Through their commercial networks, it spread everywhere. The Greeks borrowed it and added vowels. The Romans modified the Greek version into what became Latin letters. The Arabic and Hebrew alphabets evolved from the same Phoenician source. Even Indian Brahmi, the ancestor of most South Asian scripts, likely derived from it.

Chinese went a different way, keeping a logographic system that still requires memorizing thousands of characters. Japanese combined Chinese characters with two syllabic alphabets. Korean Hangul, invented by scholars in 1443 CE, is the rare alphabet not descended from Phoenician — it was designed from scratch to match the shape of the mouth when pronouncing each sound.

The alphabet's invention may be the most important information technology in history. It made mass literacy possible, which made mass education possible, which made democracy, science, and modernity possible. A tool invented by bored miners, it changed the world more than any emperor.