The alphabet was a founding technology of information. The telephone, the fax machine, the calculator, and, ultimately, the computer are only the latest innovations devised for saving, manipulating, and communicating knowledge ... In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto). The alphabet was invented only once. All known alphabets, used today or found buried on tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor, which arose near the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, sometime not much before 1500 BCE
J. Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011), Kindle loc. 199 & 562
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