And a couple of texts . . .

Checked the local library for texts using Writing history as search phrase and found two texts with relevant material. (Tried Alphabets and Alphabet as subject search phrases, but the first book mentioned here did not come up despite having Alphabets in its title! And the second one came up in a search on Alphabet but not Alphabets!)

The first one, Writing; The Story of Alphabets and Scripts discussed influences on the development of scripts and how the purpose it was used for affected its spread. It also discussed how things like writing materials eg reeds in Mesopotamia, and visual tastes, eg like those of the Egyptians, affected the form of the letters in a language’s alphabet.

It had interesting information but there seemed to be gaps in the sequence of the development of alphabets, compared with other material I've read.

The other book, The Alphabet links changes in writing more clearly for me. It makes the point that the strength of the Phoenicians as travellers and traders essentially marketed their alphabet to most of the then known world in a very effective fashion and no doubt lead to its being more readily adopted and adapted by other cultures, to the extent that there is only one major alphabetic script today that cannot be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet. This is actually disputed in more recent writings that I came across in wikipedia. The script referred to is the Korean Hangul system which was invented from scratch in the mid-1400s AD. While that researcher proposes 5 characters are derived from Phoenician, his findings are disputed.


References:

Jean, G 1987, Writing; The Story of Alphabets and Scripts, New Horizons, London
Sacks, D 2003, The Alphabet, Arrow Books, London