Why was the phoenician alphabet used by their trade partners? a. contained vowels and consonants that represented sounds. b. only contained 22 letters so it was easy for many to learn. c. it contained hundreds and hundreds of pictograms. d. it was only known by a few people in phoenician society.

The correct answer here is B. The Phoenician system of writing was developed from the kind of informal Egyptian writing system. It was extremely easy to learn in comparison to the Egyptian script as it only had 22 letter and each letter represented a sound which could easily be organized into words. There was no need to memorize thousands of ideograms any more.