The Alphabet

Everyone learns their alphabet when they are young but most people don’t think about what the alphabet really is. The definition for the word ‘Alphabet’ is “a standardized system of writing, developed in the ancient Near East and transmitted from the northwest Semites to the Greeks, in which each symbol ideally represents one sound unit in the spoken language, and from which most alphabetical scripts are derived”. Most people don’t realize how important the alphabet is and how lost we would be without it. Almost all modern Alphabets were descended from an alphabet 4000 years ago. The idea of the first alphabet was from the Egyptians who used simple pictures to represent sounds and words.
The word "alphabet" came from the Latin word Alphabetum which is originated in the Ancient Greek Αλφάβητος, which translates as Alphabetos, from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, A came from the picture of an Ox, since it sort of looked like a house, and B came from the picture of a House.
The Phoenicians and others of the region simplified the pictures further and often rotated them, but if you use your imagination, you can still make out where most of the 22 letters (consonants) came from. If you turn the A with the point down, for example, you can see a representation of an ox head. All the letters were for consonants, which make since for languages like Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and even Egyptian. But Greek, and other languages, like English, need vowels, so thee Greeks took a few of the consonants they didn't need, and turned them into vowels and then added some of their own.
During the Middle Ages lower case letters evolved from their regular our upper case letters from the cursive versions of the capital letters.
The Phoenicians wrote from right to left, same as the Hebrews and Arabs do today. The Greeks started writing right to left but changed the system. They then started changing direction every line, and finally became to the present system of left to right which has passed down to all the modern European alphabets and writing systems.