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?
Hieroglyphics weren't really ideographic after a very early point, because it's a pain in the ass making up new symbols for every word. Very quickly, it transitioned to being largely an abjad, representing only consonants. Abjads work reasonably well for semitic languages, as the consonantal roots of words carry the meaning and a reader would be able to fill in the vowels themselves via context.
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.
An alphabet (or syllabary, abjad, abugida) has a small set of symbols that can express anything, which means that it could be used by people who did something other than read and write for a living. Probably no accident that the first to catch on, and the root of possibly all others, was spread by Phoenician traders.
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.