Phoenician alphabet was the first to use ...

The names of the letters are acrophonic, and their names and shapes can be ultimately traced back to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. For example, the name of the first letter, 'aleph, means ox and developed from a picture of an ox's head. Some of the letter names were changed by the Phoenicians, including gimel, which meant camel in Phoenician, but was originally a picture of a throwing stick.