The reason why the phoenicians made their own language was mainly to record trade deals. This was because the phoenicians were very good at building boats and producing dyes and so they often used their skills to trade things with other civilisations. This meant that their new alphabet quickly spread all around the Mediterranean when they traded items and it then became the basis for many other languages. The Phoenicians also needed a way to write down what they had traded and what they needed to produce in order to trade overseas. This writing was also much simpler than the original Egyptian hieroglyphics. This is because you had to read the hieroglyphics from whatever way the people were facing in the little pictures, whereas the phoenician alphabet had set rules. For example, some of the rules were that you had to read from right to left in horizontal lines and they were much easier to write than the hieroglyphics because they were little pictures and the alphabet was singular letters.