Which ancient civilization created a system of symbols representing spoken sounds?

The Phoenicians developed a significant system of writing known as an alphabet, which was one of the first to represent spoken sounds with distinct symbols. This innovation allowed them to create a more efficient and accessible means of communication compared to earlier writing systems, such as cuneiform or hieroglyphs, which used ideograms or logograms and were less flexible in representing spoken language.

The Phoenician alphabet consisted of a series of consonantal symbols, enabling users to combine these symbols to form various words based on the phonemes of their spoken language. This concept of using characters to represent specific sounds greatly influenced many subsequent writing systems, including the Greek and Latin alphabets, which further evolved the idea by incorporating vowels and expanding the phonetic representation of language.

In contrast, the Egyptians primarily employed hieroglyphs, which combined logographic and alphabetic elements but were more complex in structure and symbolism. The Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, enhancing it to include vowels, while the Romans later adapted the Greek alphabet into what we now recognize as the Latin alphabet. Each of these civilizations built upon the Phoenician innovation, but it was the Phoenicians who first created a systematic approach to representing spoken language through a series of symbols.