The Phoenician Alphabet: How Tyre's Merchants Changed Writing

Before Beirut was Beirut, before the silk boom and the banking secrets, the coast of Lebanon belonged to the Phoenicians — sailors, dyers, and traders who spread a simple idea across the Mediterranean: an alphabet. In this episode, Lucas and Luna trace the story of the Phoenician script, from the purple dye of Tyre to the port of Byblos, where the earliest inscriptions were found. They talk about how a practical tool for keeping accounts — twenty-two consonants, no vowels — became the ancestor of Greek, Latin, and eventually the letters you're reading now. They explore the mystery of the lost Phoenician library, the papyrus that rotted away, and the clay tablets that survived. They look at how trade, not empire, spread this writing system, and why the Phoenicians, who wrote so much, left so few of their own words behind. This episode is about a people who didn't build empires but built the very medium of history itself.

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