The Phoenicians, a seafaring people from the eastern Mediterranean, traded with people from Syria to beyond Gibraltar. They sailed as far away as Cornwall and to Africa's western coast. Like goods, ideas spread via trade. Along with Aramaic, Phoenicians developed numerous forms of contemporary writing.
Phoenician is a subdivision of Canaanite, a Semitic language. In the 16th century BC, the Canaanites, the early Hebrews and the Phoenicians (who later inherited Canaan and the Canaanite culture) broke language into a finite number of fundamental, simple sounds. Using symbols to represent these sounds, they developed a phonetic script that spread with their travels.
The Phoenician script used 22 letters and was written horizontally from right to left. Through the centuries, the Phoenician script developed, having its own colonial subdivisions: Cypro-Phoenician and Carthaginian or Punic script. Phoenician inscriptions have been found throughout the Mediterranean, including Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, Greece, Sardinia and North Africa. But it was the Greeks who transformed the Phoenician consonant script to what would eventually mutate into the modern alphabet.
Not all languages use the same sounds. And not all languages place the same value on consonants and vowels. To compensate for what the Phoenician script lacked in terms of what the Greek language required, the Greeks used some of the Phoenician consonant symbols to represent their own vowels. They simply reassigned Phoenician letters (for which the Greeks did not have a corresponding sound) to sounds the Phoenicians didn't use.
Thus was born the basis of our alphabet, the word itself coming from the Greek letters alpha and beta. But an argument can be made the word also stems from the Canaanite first two letters, alpu and betu.