The story of the alphabet A breakthrough in the story of writing occurred with the emergence of an alphabet in the Middle East around 1700 BC. In this system, each letter represents a single sound in the spoken language, rather than a whole object or idea. The Phoenicians (who wrote rfom right to left) used a sound-based alphabet, and around 1000 BC their system was adopted by the ancient Greeks. The Greeks however, reversed the shaped of Phoenician letters and wrote from left to right. Greek letters may have been used by the Etruscans, who lived in central Italy before the Romans. Greek letters were borrowed by the Romans, who slightly reshaped them to create the alphabet we use today (the word alphabet comes from the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta)