Which civilization developed the first alphabets used by many cultures?

• A. Egyptians
• B. Greeks
• C. Romans
• D. Phoenicians

Answer: (D)

The idea here is how an alphabet first spread across cultures. The Phoenicians created a practical writing system that used symbols for individual sounds, a big shift from the complex pictorial scripts that came before. This smaller, adaptable set of signs was easy to learn and easy to pass along through trade networks, so it spread widely around the eastern Mediterranean. The Greeks borrowed this script and added vowels, turning it into a true alphabet that could represent all the sounds of many languages, and the Romans later adopted and spread that family of letters even further. Egyptians, by contrast, relied on hieroglyphs and related scripts, which functioned differently and did not become the basis for alphabets used by many cultures. So the Phoenicians are the civilization that developed the first alphabets used by many cultures.