his attendant
deities, and came finally to be considered as the inventor of letters.*

* The part of counsellor which Thot played in connexion with
the god of Byblos was described at some length in the
writings attributed to Sankhoniathon.

[Illustration: 105.jpg THE PHOENICIAN THOT]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after an intaglio engraved in M. de
Vogue.

The epoch, indeed, in which he became a naturalised Phoenician coincides
approximately with a fundamental revolution in the art of writing--that
in which a simple and rapid stenography was substituted for the
complicated and tedious systems with which the empires of the ancient
world had been content from their origin. Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Arvad,
had employed up to this period the most intricate of these systems. Like
most of the civilized nations of Western Asia, they had conducted their
diplomatic and commercial correspondence in the cuneiform character
impressed upon clay tablets. Their kings had had recourse to a
Babylonian model for communicating to the Amenothes Pharaohs the
expression of their wishes or their loyalty; we now behold them, after
an interval of four hundred years and more*--during which we have no
examples of their monuments--possessed of a short and commodious script,
without the encumbrance of ideograms, determinatives, polyphony and
syllabic sounds, such as had fettered the Egyptian and Chaldaean
scribes, in spite of their cleverness in dealing with them. Phonetic
articulations were ultimately resolved into twenty-two sounds, to each
of which a special sign was attached, which collectively took the place
of the hundreds or thousands of signs formerly required.

* The inscription on the bronze cup dedicated to the Baal of
the Lebanon, goes back probably to the time of Hiram I., say
the Xth century before our era; the reasons advanced by
Winckler for dating it in the time of Hiram II. have not
been fully accepted up to the present. By placing the
introduction of the alphabet somewhere between Amenothes IV.
in the XVth and Hiram I. in the Xth century before our era,
and by taking the middle date between them, say the
accession of the XXIs'dynasty towards the year 1100 B.C. for
its invention or adoption, we cannot go far wrong one way or
the other.

[Illustration: 106.jpg ONE OF THE MOST ANCIENT PHOENICIAN INSCRIPTIONS]

Drawn by Paucher-Gudin, from a heliograv