I wonder why Mediterranean nations switched from ideograms to alphabet as soon as one was invented. Probably they did not have enough surplus grain to feed something like the Unicode consortium?
According to the account I've heard, it's the greeks who invented the alphabet, by accident. The Phoenician script used single symbols to represent consonants, including the glottal stop (and some pharyngeal consonant that would likely be subject to a similar process, iirc). The glottal stop was represented by aleph, and because Greek didn't have contrastive glottal stops in its phoneme inventory, Greeks just interpreted the vowel that followed it as what the symbol was meant to represent.
It's a bit of a just so story, but also completely plausible.