German runes and Phoenician alphabet

The poblem of the origin of the Germanic runes and the runic writing system is considered unsolved. Many aspects of the runes are enigmatic even for the most widely accepted thesis, that of the Latin origin of the runes. The present article develops the thesis that runic writing derives directly from the Phoenician writing system of the Carthaginians who dominated the Atlantic coasts from the fifth to the end of the third century, rather than via Greek, Etruscan, or Latin. This thesis explains all the distinctive properties of runic writing: the form of those runes for which Latin offers no model; the acrophonic naming of the runes with appellatives; various aspects of the order of the older futhark, especially the beginning with a rune named (+)fehu 'cattle'; the frequent use of scriptura continua; the omission of nasals before homorganic consonants; the writing of geminates with single rather than double consonants. Most importantly, the Phoenician thesis explains the concentration of the oldest runic finds in the Scandinavian regions between the German and the Baltic Seas rather than close to the Roman Empire and answers the question of the reasons for the extraordinarily early availability of an alphabetic writing system of its own in northern Europe.