High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium into the history of writing. The first alphabet emerged around 2000 BCE to represent the language of Semitic workers in Egypt, and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Nearly all alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development or were inspired by its design. The most common in use is Latin, deriving from the first alphabetic script to consistently use vowels, Greek.