The Phoenician alphabet represents the oldest alphabet in the world. The Phoenicians were known as merchants and sailors, and the pouring of an effective alphabet facilitated trade. This alphabet consisted of twenty two consonants, while the vowels were pronounced implicitly, that is, they were implied even though they were not written. It is little known that Phoenician alphabet originates from Egyptian hieroglyphs, that is, individual letters symbols, in which one sound was represented by one symbol, as opposed to image symbols, from Egyptian hieroglyphs that the Phoenicians adopted and created an alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet was adopted by the Greeks for ease of reading, pronunciation and memory, although not in the original, because the Greeks added vocals, which were already pronounced but not written, and some of the consonants had different letters, symbols.