The Romans created the Latin alphabet by adapting the alphabet of the Etruscans, the most powerful civilisation in Italy prior to the rise of Rome. The Etruscan alphabet was in turn derived from the Greek. As Rome’s power spread, Latin and its alphabet also spread across the empire. In the medieval period when Latin became the language of education, literature and religion, the Latin alphabet began to be used to write the languages derived from Latin such as French, Spanish and Italian and also displaced scripts such as the runic script used for Germanic languages and the Ogam script for Celtic languages.