Sumerian
3300 BCE to 100 CE
The Sumerians were one of the earliest urban societies to emerge in the world. Like all inventions, writing emerged because there was a need for it.
This advance allowed news and ideas to be carried to distant places without having to rely on a messenger's memory. It was developed as record-keeping, commercial transactions or for administration. There are also texts that served as "copy books" for the education of future scribes.
The Sumerian writing system was adopted and modified by others. In this way, Sumerian was used continually until the 1st century CE, making it one of the longest used writing system in history.
1100 BCE to 300 CE
The Phoenician script is important as many modern scripts can be traced through it. Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek scripts are all descended from Phoenician.
Phoenician is a "consonantal alphabet", and only contains letters representing consonants. It was the first widely used script in which one sound was represented by one symbol. Its simplicity allowed it to be used in multiple languages, as well as allowing common people to learn how to write.
This upset the long-standing status of writing systems only being learned and employed by members of the royal and religious hierarchies of society, who used writing as an instrument of power to control access to information by the larger population.
Greek
700 BCE to 100 CE
The Greeks were the first Europeans to learn to write with an alphabet, and from them alphabetic writing spread to the rest of Europe, eventually leading down to all modern European alphabets. There were many variants of the early Greek alphabet, each suited to a local dialect.
Early Greek was written right-to-left.
However, eventually its direction changed to "ox-turning", where the direction of writing changes every line. Starting on the right of the writing surface and writing to the left, and when the end is reached, the direction is reversed and writing goes towards the right. The orientation of the letter themselves is dependent on the direction of writing as well.
Greek letters were also used to denote numbers as well. The Greek alphabet is still a living writing system in Greece as well as Greek communities around the world.
700 BCE to Present
The Romans brought their alphabet to wherever they went. Because of the prestige of Roman culture, many non-Roman nations embraced Latin for court use, and adopted the Latin alphabet to write their own language.
Western European nations all wrote using the Latin alphabet, and with European imperialism in the last 500 years, the Latin alphabet is probably the most used writing system in the world.
Slowly the Latin alphabet became increasingly standardised. Writing direction settled on left-to-right.
The letters Y and Z were added for to write Greeks loan words during the early 1st century BCE. With these two additions, the Latin alphabet was nearly identical to most Western European alphabets. During the middle ages, new letters were created by slightly modifying an existing letter.
By 1011, a formal list of the Old English alphabet was made and included all of our present letters except J, U and W. The ampersand and five uniquely English letters, designated ond, wynn, thorn, eth and ash, were included.
With the introduction of the printing press to Great Britain in the mid 15th century by William Caxton, English became more standardised and modern English appeared. In the mid-16th century, V and U were split into two letters, with U becoming the vowel, and V, the consonant. In 1604, Robert Cawdrey published the first English dictionary, and about this time, J was added to create the modern English alphabet we know today.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the first type designers of Latin typefaces used Carolingian minuscules as models for the “lowercase” letters. This has continued into the 21st with no further evolution.
