The first letters were exclusively consonantal. They all stem from logograms that were reinterpreted as phonograms according to the acrophonic principle. The names of the letters (aleph, beth ...) are the concepts represented by the erstwhile logograms, translated into Canaanite. Some of the first letters still bear a remote pictographic resemblance to the object represented.
The essential phases in the evolution of the alphabet are the following:
| beginning | name | place | language | characteristics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| -3200 | Hieratic | Egypt | Egyptian | only partly alphabetic |
| -1500 | Proto-Semitic | Palestine, Sinai, Egypt | ? | 22/23 letters, few inscriptions, largely undeciphered. Hieratic origin disputed. |
| -1400 | Proto Canaanite | Israel, Lebanon | Canaanite | about a dozen inscriptions, |
| -1050 | Phoenician | Lebanon | Phoenician, Aramaic | letters represent consonants only |
| -950 | Paleo-Hebrew | Israel, Judah | Hebrew | |
| -800 | Aramaic | Near East | Aramaic, Hebrew | square-script, modified version of Phoenician alphabet, still exclusively consonantal |
| -180 | Hebrew | Israel | Hebrew | modified version of the Aramaic alphabet, 22 letters |
| -800 | Greek | Greece | Greek | introduction of vowel letters |
| -280 | Khāroshti | Northwest India | Sanskrit | adapted from Aramaic |