The Phoenician alphabet is a 22-consonant abjad that develops gradually from proto-Canaanite writing during the Bronze Age collapse, standardizing toward the end of the 12th century BC. It has no identifiable individual inventor: it is the result of a collective evolution that radically simplifies earlier hieroglyphic and cuneiform systems into a reduced set of purely phonetic signs. The oldest known testimony of the fully developed Phoenician alphabet is the 38-word inscription carved on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Byblos, dated to around 1000 BC and discovered in 1923 by French archaeologist Pierre Montet in the royal necropolis of Byblos. The inscription, commissioned by Ittobaal, son of Ahiram, for his father's tomb, includes a curse against anyone who disturbs the burial. Being a simple phonetic system instead of a pictographic one, the alphabet was quickly adopted and adapted by the peoples the Phoenicians traded with: the Greeks adopt it around the 9th-8th century BC, adding vowels, giving rise via the Etruscans and Romans to the Latin alphabet, and via later variants to the Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets.