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The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been inculcated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium. Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one discovery, or were directly inspired by its design, including the Phoenician alphabet and the Greek alphabet.