Nubian atmosphere has preserved almost in their pristine sharpness.

The legend, according to which Cadmus the Tyrian sailed for Greece in
search of Europa, the damsel who personified the West, designates the
island of Thera as the earliest site of Phoenician colonization in the
Aegean, and from inscriptions found there this may be regarded as the
first spot of European soil on which words were written, and they exhibit
better than any others the progressive form of the Cadmean alphabet. The
oldest inscriptions found on Hellenic soil bearing a definite date are
those cut on the pedestals of the statues which lined the sacred way
leading to the temple of Apollo, near Miletus. Several of those, now in
the British Museum, range in date over the sixth century B.C. They belong,
not to the primitive alphabet, but to the Ionian, one of the local
varieties which mark the second stage, which may be called the epoch of
transition, which began in the seventh and lasted to the close of the
fifth century B.C. It is not till the middle of the fifth century that we
have any dated monuments belonging to the Western types. Among these are
the names of the allied states of Hellas, inscribed on the coils of the
three-headed bronze serpent which supported the gold tripod dedicated to
the Delphian Apollo, 476 B.C. This famous monument was transported to
Byzantium by Constantine the Great, and still stands in the Hippodrome at
Constantinople. Of equal interest is the bronze Etruscan helmet in the
British Museum, dedicated to the Olympian Zeus, in commemoration of the
great victory off Cumae, which destroyed the naval supremacy of the
Etruscans, 474 B.C., and is celebrated in an ode by Pindar.

The third epoch witnessed the emergence of the classical alphabets of
European culture, the Ionian and the Italic.

The Ionian has been the source of the Eastern scripts, Romaic, Coptic,