Also, the Phoenicians were the descendants of the Canaanites, who (according to one etymological theory) are also named after the color purple.

The Phoenicians were a semitic people like the Jews, and they gave the world its first alphabet which was adopted by both the Hebrews and the Greeks. The Greeks added vowels, and the Romans adopted that alphabet and it became roughly the one we use today.

If you go to the Wiki page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet) and scroll down to the Table of Letters header, you can see how the letters evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the letters we use today. It’s particularly interesting to me that our letter “B” (which the greeks called “beta” and which forms the tail end of “alphabet”) was originally a house, and the semitic languages called it “bēt” which was their word for house, which you can still see today in Biblical place names like Bethel (house of God—“El” was a very old name for God).

Yea, I loooove that history too.

It's interesting how, unlike Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs that were complex systems that came from dedicated scribes of the court, Phoenicia's alphabet was the kind of pragmatic system you can imagine a more mercantile society developing.

It's wild that it turned into the scripts: Latin, Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and beyond.

Also interesting is Chinese script, which was saved from this by Stalin telling Mao that China should keep its unique writing, which Russia of course was already doing. Mao did do the simplification, but he turned away from his previous plan to standardize the latin script for Chinese.