writing. For while the Babylonians and Assyrians rested content
with their elaborate syllabary, a nation on either side of them,
geographically speaking, solved the problem, which they perhaps
did not even recognize as a problem; wrested from their syllabary
its secret of consonants and vowels, and by adopting an arbitrary
sign for each consonantal sound, produced that most wonderful of
human inventions, the alphabet.

The two nations credited with this wonderful achievement are the
Phoenicians and the Persians. But it is not usually conceded that
the two are entitled to anything like equal credit. The Persians,
probably in the time of Cyrus the Great, used certain characters
of the Babylonian script for the construction of an alphabet; but
at this time the Phoenician alphabet had undoubtedly been in use
for some centuries, and it is more than probable that the Persian
borrowed his idea of an alphabet from a Phoenician source. And
that, of course, makes all the difference. Granted the idea of an
alphabet, it requires no great reach of constructive genius to
supply a set of alphabetical characters; though even here, it may
be added parenthetically, a study of the development of alphabets
will show that mankind has all along had a characteristic
propensity to copy rather than to invent.

Regarding the Persian alphabet-maker, then, as a copyist rather
than a true inventor, it remains to turn attention to the
Phoenician source whence, as is commonly believed, the original
alphabet which became "the mother of all existing alphabets" came
into being. It must be admitted at the outset that evidence for
the Phoenician origin of this alphabet is traditional rather than
demonstrative. The Phoenicians were the great traders of