more civilized, and, receiving
them, learned to imitate them. For a long time the Greeks had only
vases, jewels, and idols brought by the Phoenicians, and these served
them as models. The Phoenicians brought simultaneously from Egypt and
from Assyria industry and commodities.

=The Alphabet.=--At the same time they exported their alphabet. The
Phoenicians did not invent writing. The Egyptians knew how to write many
centuries before them, they even made use of letters each of which
expressed its own sound, as in our alphabet. But their alphabet was
still encumbered with ancient signs which represented, some a syllable,
others an entire word. Doubtless the Phoenicians had need of a simpler
system for their books of commerce. They rejected all the syllabic signs
and ideographs, preserving only twenty-two letters, each of which marks
a sound (or rather an articulation of the language). The other peoples
imitated this alphabet of twenty-two letters. Some, like the Jews, wrote
from right to left just as the Phoenicians themselves did; others, like
the Greeks, from left to right. All have slightly changed the form of
the letters, but the Phoenician alphabet is found at the basis of all
the alphabets--Hebrew, Lycian, Greek, Italian, Etruscan, Iberian,
perhaps even in the runes of the Norse. It is the Phoenicians that taught
the world how to write.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] Renan ("Mission de Phenicio," p. 818) says, "I noticed at Tripolis
a sarcophagus serving as a public fountain and the sculptured face of it
was turned to the wall. I was told that a governor had placed it thus so
as not to provide distractions for the inhabitants."

[38] See ch. xxiii.

[39] See chs. xxvi., xxvii., xxviii.

[40] These idols, one of their principal exports, are found wherever the
Phoenicians traded.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HEBREWS

ORIGIN OF THE HEBREW PEOPLE

=The Bible.=--The Jews united all their sacred books into a single
aggregation which we call by a Greek name the Bible, that is to say,
the Book. It is the Book par excellence. The sacred book of the Jews
became also the sacred book of the Christians. The Bible is at the
same time the history of the Jewish nation, and all that we know of
the sacred people we owe to the sacred books.

=The Hebrews.=--When the Semites had descended from the mountains of
Armenia into the plains of the Euphrates, one of their tribes, at the
time of the first Chaldean empire, withdrew to the west,