Hey guys, Id be happy to help. So when people first started writing they didnt use alphabets, they logographic(like Chinese) and logo-syllabic(like Japanese and Korean) writing systems. If you dont want to read about me talking about history skip to paragraph 6.
The most likely and most widely accepted reason for the transition to the alphabet was that illiterate Semitic tribes came into contact with literate societies, and unwilling to adapt the complex and foreign nature of the writing system they made their own form of writing which started as highly simplified versions of the more complex systems. An early instance of this phenomenon can be observed in the desert paths in the Egyptian western desert on the paths that lead from Thebes in southern Egypt to the Kharga and Dakhla oasis. Here rock inscriptions show a bastardized version of Egyptian hieroglyphs that resulted in something very similar to an alphabet. This early alphabet died out however.
http://lbi-project.org/lbs/data/pichler ... 0sah16.pdf
However it was from a very similar occurrence that our modern alphabet saw its origins. In the Sinai peninsula proto-Canaanite tribes inhabited the area but lived a simple nomadic existence. They were soon colonized by the Egyptians to be exploited for the rich copper deposits in the mountains of Sinai. To deal with the local inhabitants and their strange Semitic names, the Egyptians created new characters that simply represented sounds so they could write these names. The local tribes then adapted these purely phonetic characters and simplified them into what is known as the proto-Canaanite script. Most believe this early script evolved into the Phonecian script(ancestor of our alphabet) when these Semitic tribes moved into the ancient Levant(Israel, Lebanon and Syria), the only problem is we only have a handful of proto-Canaanite inscriptions, so its hard to say with high certainty.
An alternate theory is that the Ancient Phoenicians actually created the alphabet by simplifying a complex syllabic writing system of their own. This is known as the Byblos Syllabary. The problem is once again, we have very few Byblos syllabary inscriptions and its hard to make claims with certainty.
Another theory which I find highly interesting but Western scholars often reject, is Dr. S.R. Rao's theory that the Phoenician alphabet was actually copied from the phonetic characters of the Indus Valley script of the Harappa civilization from NW India. Most are unconvinced, but I highly recommend the amazing comparative analysis done by Dr. Rao in "Dawn and Devolution of the Indus Civilization" (1991).
What we know for sure is that the Phoenician alphabet was created in Phoenicia(modern Lebanon) and that it was the origin of our alphabet. Phoenician traders spread their writing system to ancient Greece, displacing the indigenous Linear A and Linear B writing systems. The Greeks changed it and adapted it to fit their language. The Romans later took adopted the Greek alphabet but changed it to suit their own language(Latin) and this created the alphabet we use today: the Latin alphabet. The changes made to adapt to the English languages were very minimal.
So at this point I can talk about the individual letters brought up. The letter A was mentioned in the OP, and this is one of the easiest examples to use because it has changed so little from the Phoenician alphabet. Our A is derived from Greek "Alpha" which is a Hellenized rendition of "Alef" the Phoenician name for the letter. Alef in Phoenician literally means bull. The only real change from the Alef character to A is that it was flipped upside down by the Greeks. Flip an A upside down and the origin of the letter will become quite obvious. It is a triangular head with two horns, the head of a bull. They used a bull to represent the sound /a/ because bulls were a common part of the life, were easy to represent, and the initial sound in alef is /a/. A similar process can be done for most letters and arrive at similarly simple conclusions.
This probably leaves you wondering how exactly does the alphabet connect to Free Masonry and other European secret societies. Well, the answer is that these societies were founded at a time when the alphabet had long since existed, and any meaning that those societies had for the alphabet would have evolved in their own culture, long after the existence of the alphabet. So to find any hidden meaning in them, you ought not to ask history of the original meaning, but of the meanings formed in these societies. Something that will probably interest you and help you pursue this question, is the Copiale cipher. It was a secret enciphered text written by German Free Masons, but their secret writing system was recently deciphered and the text revealed. Im pretty sure a PDF of the text and translation is online.
