Around 1600 BC and it came from proto-canaanite.

The Phoenicians developed the Phoenician alphabet, also known as the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for writing. One theory is that it may have had its origins as an adaptation of the Egyptian hieroglyphs to the Canaanite language.

The Phoenician alphabet was the basis for the Hebrew alphabet as well as the Greek alphabet.

The Phoenician alphabet developed from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, during the 15th century BCE. Before that, the Phoenicians wrote with a cuneiform script.

Phoenicia was an ancient Semitic civilization situated on the western, coastal part of the Fertile Crescent and centered on the coastline of modern Lebanon and Tartus Governorate in Syria. The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1200 BCE, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. The Phoenician alphabet developed from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and it was perhaps the first alphabetic script to be wide used. Phoenician spread around the Mediterranean, particularly to Tunisia, southern parts of the Iberian Peninsula which is the modern Spain, Portugal, Malta, southern France and Sicily, and was spoken until the 1st century AD. Historians do not speak on how the language made what easy in the least part.

The Semitic proto-alphabet provided the foundation for our current alphabet