Page "Alphabet" Paragraph 6

The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt.

By the 27th century BC Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs which are called uniliterals, to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel ( or no vowel ) to be supplied by the native speaker.

These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.