††††From about 3100 BC, the ancient Egyptians developed a different form of writing called hieroglyphics. Their first writing systems used pictures, but the pictures did not enable them to express complicated ideas. The Egyptians developed a system which used picture-signs to represent sounds. They carved and painted these hieroglyphs on stone, and also wrote them with reed pens on papyrus, a sort of paper made from crushed reeds.
The first proper alphabet, in which individual letters could be joined together to make up words, was developed in Syria in 1500 BC.
In about 800 BC, the Greeks adopted the alphabet of the Phoenicians, a trading people from what is now Lebanon. The Greeks had to add vowels since the Phoenician alphabet used only consonants. At first, they wrote from right to left. Then they tried changing direction at the end of each line, right to left and then back again to right, and so on. Eventually they settled on writing left to right, as we do when writing English today.
