antiquity; undoubtedly they were largely responsible for the
transmission of the alphabet from one part of the world to
another, once it had been invented. Too much credit cannot be
given them for this; and as the world always honors him who makes
an idea fertile rather than the originator of the idea, there can
be little injustice in continuing to speak of the Phoenicians as
the inventors of the alphabet. But the actual facts of the case
will probably never be known. For aught we know, it may have been
some dreamy-eyed Israelite, some Babylonian philosopher, some
Egyptian mystic, perhaps even some obscure Cretan, who gave to
the hard-headed Phoenician trader this conception of a
dismembered syllable with its all-essential, elemental,
wonder-working consonant. But it is futile now to attempt even to
surmise on such unfathomable details as these. Suffice it that
the analysis was made; that one sign and no more was adopted for
each consonantal sound of the Semitic tongue, and that the entire
cumbersome mechanism of the Egyptian and Babylonian writing
systems was rendered obsolescent. These systems did not yield at
once, to be sure; all human experience would have been set at
naught had they done so. They held their own, and much more than
held their own, for many centuries. After the Phoenicians as a
nation had ceased to have importance; after their original script
had been endlessly modified by many alien nations; after the
original alphabet had made the conquest of all civilized Europe
and of far outlying portions of the Orient--the Egyptian and
Babylonian scribes continued to indite their missives in the same
old pictographs and syllables.

The inventive thinker must have been struck with amazement when,
after making the fullest analysis of speech-sounds of which he