They gave
us our alphabet.
The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing,
invented by the Sumerians. But they regarded these pothooks
as a clumsy waste of time. They were practical business men
and could not spend hours engraving two or three letters.
They set to work and invented a new system of writing which
was greatly superior to the old one. They borrowed a few
pictures from the Egyptians and they simplified a number of
the wedge-shaped figures of the Sumerians. They sacrificed
the pretty looks of the older system for the advantage of speed
and they reduced the thousands of different images to a short
and handy alphabet of twenty-two letters.
In due course of time, this alphabet travelled across the
AEgean Sea and entered Greece. The Greeks added a few
letters of their own and carried the improved system to Italy.
The Romans modified the figures somewhat and in turn taught
them to the wild barbarians of western Europe. Those wild
barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason why
this book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin
and not in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the nail-
script of the Sumerians.
THE INDO-EUROPEANS
THE INDO-EUROPEAN PERSIANS CONQUER
THE SEMITIC AND THE EGYPTIAN
WORLD
THE world of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and Phoenicia
had existed almost thirty centuries and the venerable
races of the Fertile Valley were getting old and tired.
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