The Coming of The Alphabet
Most aphabets in use nowadays have evolved unimaginably from that supposedly original one.
The abundance and variety of them we observe today from the countries of Europe to the Middle East may be surprising but no matter how unbelievable it may sound they all come from one particular alphabet which in scientists'' circles goes by name of "Proto-Sinaitic script".
It appeared in the Middle Bronze Age in Egypt around 1700 BCE. Developped by Semitic workers it was based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. Later it was altered into a new form, Proto-Canaanite, more elaborate one. It had at least 20 letters.
Now, many wonder why modern-day letters look like they actually do look. It''s not a mystery. The Proto-Canaanite alphabet isn''t just a meaningless set of characters but rather each letter bears peculiar significance. Thus, the first letter, "alp" (akin to Hebrew''s "aleph" and Greek''s "alpha") essentially means "an ox" and if you rotate "A" 90º anticlockwise the picture will resemble a head of an ox. Accordingly, the second letter "bet" meant "a house" and in writing really looked like a picture of a house. This phenomenon proves true with every letter of this alphabet.
OK, getting back to the later evolutions, the Proto-Canaanite eventually became the Phoenician alphabet. Phoenicians being sea merchants quickly spread their writing system around the seas they happened to travel: Mediterranean, Aegean etc. Predictably, Greeks adopted the alphabet however slightly changed it. For instance, all the previous writing systems only had consonants. The Greeks added vowels. At the same time the peoples of the Italian peninsula embraced modifications of the Phoenician alphabet to develop a blueprint for Latin characters.
As you see, all the Romance and German languages like English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch use Latin alphabet. Characters for Slavic languages were devised by Cyril and Methodius who derived them primarily from Greek however drawing two letters from Hebrew for non-existent equivalents in Greek.
The scripts of India mostly descend from the Brahmi script which in its turn is believed to come from Aramaic (an early Middle-Eastern alphabet).
The Middle-Eastern alphabets are all direct descendents of the Proto-Canaanite and were heavily influenced by Paleo-Hebrew and Aramaic.
Therefore when we come across a strange-looking writing exclamations like "It''s all alien writing!" are a little odd since almost alphabets on Earth are related.