Even as the alphabet spread across the Mediterranean world, memory of the pictographic origins of the alphabet seems to have been lost. Phoenician inscriptions on Egyptian objects show how abstract the signs of the alphabet had become when compared to the pictographic hieroglyphic signs. The Greeks were conscious of the alphabet's Phoenician roots, and referred to their letters as phoïnikeia grammata (Phoenician letters), but the earliest pictographic history of the alphabet was left for modern discovery.
