C.K., I got to wondering (she said in Southern U.S. idiom)
if perhaps heiroglyphics might have played a part in this.
I found this site:
http://www.torstar.com/rom/egypt/

It says that one type of heiroglyph was intended to represent the sounds of the spoken word. So it makes sense to me that these symbols would have been drawn in the same order that they were spoken.

So, continuing that thought, I wonder if other early languages got written in the order that the sounds were spoken, and if that somehow got "translated" by the most
common groupings or something, into rudimentary alphabets as we know them. A stretch, I know--wish I were a real
researcher, but I'm sure someone-who-shall-remain-nameless knows where to look.