The Arabic alphabet used to be an abjad before the development of symbols for vowels weakened its status.
The Proto-Sinaitic script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs instead of using many different signs for words, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B
 The Late Mycenaeans added vowels to the alphabet, this new script, Linear B, gave rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West

