phoenician

The Phoenician alphabet was a huge step forward precisely because it was much simpler and easier to learn.

You don't see us fretting over whether we should eliminate the Greek roots or Phoenician lettering from English.

Coinage and trade has plenty of historical record in Phoenician and Roman era.

Just as when you see the letter F you think of the sound, not that it looks like a hook: Phoenician 𐤅 - wāw.

I think it was a Phoenician army, which had learned to ride and battle bareback.

And Phoenician and Proto-Sinaitic in turn derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Tyrian referring to Tyre, one of the major Phoenician city-states.

Carthage was the Phoenician colony that outlasted the home country.

However, there's still a difference with cuneiform: All of the examples you mentioned are derivatives of the Phoenician alphabet, which have around 20 to 30 characters each.

We know that's not true, but it doesn't change the legend (and indeed, the legend of Cadmus explicitly states that the Greek alphabet was derived from the Phoenician one...).

Consider Herodot's account (he lived in the 5th Century BC) about the circumnavigation of the African continent by a Phoenician expedition under Pharao Necho II, about 150 years earlier.

You could probably get by just fine without speaking it, since most of the Phoenician traders you would encounter most likely have a rudimentary grasp of the local language.

However, Kavafis (greek for Cavafy) turned this around and is describing all the great things that one can benefit from during such journeys: new harbours, Phoenician goods, Egyptian cities - all these pictures are used to demonstrate how rich one will be after an "odyssey" even if he/she has to face Laistrygonians, Cyclops and angry Poseidons.

Our alphabet is derived from the Roman which is derived from Greek which is derived from Phoenician.

It's not Arabic, and it looks sort of like Greek (or maybe Phoenician), but different.

The Latin alphabet, or rather Phoenician, from which Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts are descended, is more like 3500 years old.