The alphabet is the singlemost important and enduring contribution the Canaanite culture has given to later civilization. The simple phonetic alphabet enabled the spread of literacy to the masses, rather than keeping it in the hands of the educated scribes. The earliest writing, dating to the end of the 4th millennium BCE, has been found in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Writing involves the use of a system of signs or symbols to represent the spoken language.
In Mesopotamia, scribes recorded commercial transactions on clay tablets. In Egypt, hieroglyphics were inscribed in stone and written on papyrus. The earliest writing took the form of pictographic signs in which pictures were used to represent words and objects. In Mesopotamia, the pictographs became more stylized over time and eventually developed into wedge-shaped linear signs known today as cuneiform. Cuneiform signs could represent either whole words or phonetic syllables consisting of vowel-consonant groupings.