very name
of Alphabet was a Phenician word. We can well understand that the
Phenicians should have taught the Ionians in Asia Minor a knowledge of
the alphabet, partly for commercial purposes, _i.e._ for making
contracts, partly for enabling them to use those useful little sheets,
called _Periplus_, or _Circumnavigations_, which at that time were as
precious to sailors as maps were to the adventurous seamen of the
middle ages. But from that to a written literature, in our sense of
the word, there is still a wide step. It is well known that the
Germans, particularly in the North, had their Runes for inscriptions
on tombs, goblets, public monuments, but not for literary
purposes.[262] Even if a few Ionians at Miletus and other centres of
political and commercial life acquired the art of writing, where could
they find writing materials? and still more important, where could
they find readers? The Ionians, when they began to write, had to be
satisfied with a hide or pieces of leather, which they called
_diphthera_, and until that was brought to the perfection of vellum
or parchment, the occupation of an author cannot have been very
agreeable.[263]

So far as we know at present the Ionians began to write about the
middle of the sixth century B.C.; and, whatever may have been said to
the contrary, Wolf's _dictum_ still holds good that with them the
beginning of a written literature was the same as the beginning of
prose writing.

Writing at that time was an effort, and such an effort was made for some
great purpose only. Hence the first written skins were what we should
call Murray's Handbooks, called _Periegesis_ or _Periodos_, or, if
treating of sea-voyages, _Periplus_, that is, guide-books, books to lead
travellers round a country or round a town. Connected with these
itineraries were the accounts of the foundations of cities, the
_Ktisis_. Such books existed in Asia Minor during the sixth and fifth
centuries, and their writers were called by a general term,
_Logographi_, or [Greek: logioi] or [Greek: logopoioi],[264] as opposed
to [Greek: aoidoi], the poets. They were the forerunners of the Greek
historians, and Herodotus (443 B.C.), the so-called father of history,
made frequent use of their works.

The whole of this incipient literary activity belonged to Asia Minor.
From "Guides through towns and countries," literature seems to have
spread at an early time to Guides through life, or philosophical
dicta, such as a