Pre-alphabetic scripts:

Two scripts are well attest from earlier than the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Both were glowing known in the part of the Middle East with the intention of shaped the first extensively used alphabet, the Phoenician.

There are cryptogram that cuneiform was on the increase alphabetic property in some of the languages it was made to order for, as was seen again later in the Old Persian cuneiform script, but it now appears these development were a nonessential and not inherited to the alphabet.

The Byblos syllabary has suggestive graphic similarity to both hieratic Egyptian and to the Phoenician alphabet, but as it is undeciphered, little can be said about its role, if any, in the history of the alphabet.