The Phoenicians. The Greek alphabet is a variant of the The Phoenician alphabet; then the Latin alphabet is a descendant of the Greek alphabet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet

The names of the letters - each letter is a Phoenician word, it happens that they are very similar to the Hebrew alphabet ;

The letters/glyphs look alf - (hebrew Alef) is an ox; bet (hebrew bet) is a house; gaml (hebrew Gimel) is a camel; etc. etc.

Actually the letters look somewhat similar to the letter names.

It is often argued that alphabet was ordered in this specific way because letters were used by the Phoenicians for numbering items. Just like 1 comes before 2, which comes before 3, ..., A had to come before B, which had to come before C, etc. To provide with documented examples, the tablets of Heliastes, like the 24 songs of the Iliad and the Odyssey, used this kind of numbering. Funerary inscriptions of the Lower Period (ancient Egypt, Phoenician and Semitic) also did. However, in the present state of our knowledge, we can only consider the Greeks and the Jews as contenders of letter-numerals, therefore, the presumption Phoenicians may have used letters as numbers is backed by interpretation rather than by strong physical evidence.

Our alphabet is inherited from the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet which gave rise to the Greek alphabet and the Paleo-Hebraic writing, as well as the modern aphabet of the Samaritans, among others. Remarkably, the 22 original Phoenician letters have been remained more or less intact by almost all derivative alphabets. Because they were orally represented through a set of phonems, using them in fixed rythmic sequences of phonems - or words they represented - made it easy to use them for indexation and numeration purposes. Each letter was a meaningful word (aleph: ox ; bet: home ; gaml: camel ; delt: door ; and so on).

One of the reasons the Phoenician alphabet was successful and spread faster than other forms of writings was because it was attached to meaningful phonems, making it much easier to learn than, for example, the complicated hyeroglyphic Egyptian writing. Why was it fixed in this particular order? Many scholars suggest oral tradition is at stake. Reciting the alphabet in this particular order would be akin of telling a story that could easily be transmitted through oral tradition. And once the indexation of written documentation followed this particular narrative, it made sense to use it for administrative purpose. As the Phoenician alphabet was more convenient, easier to grasp than other written forms, and since it was used by travellers/merchants, it was fast to influence written and spoken language in the Mediterranean region.

EDIT: Grammar.

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