Ancient Mesopotamians used pictures of basic objects to preserve and describe their culture. The Phoenicians pivoted from pictures to symbols around 1600 B.C., a harbinger of our modern alphabet. Each symbol represented a spoken sound, but the reader read the symbols from right to left.
This method spread to Israel and Greece, where the Phoenician alphabet was refashioned into the Greek alphabet, but the Greeks invented vowels and redirected the reader from left to right.
