cularly that which
related to the great antiquity of characters similar to the Phoenician
alphabetical signs, is somewhat disconcerting. Its general trend,
however, is quite in the same direction with most of the new
archaeological knowledge of recent decades---that is to say, it tends
to emphasize the idea that human civilization in most of its important
elaborations is vastly older than has hitherto been supposed. It may be
added, however, that no definite clews are as yet available that enable
us to fix even an approximate date for the origin of the Phoenician
alphabet. The signs, to which reference has been made, may well have
been in existence for thousands of years, utilized merely as property
marks, symbols for counting and the like, before the idea of setting
them aside as phonetic symbols was ever conceived. Nothing is more
certain, in the judgment of the present-day investigator, than that man
learned to write by slow and painful stages. It is probable that the
conception of such an analysis of speech sounds as would make the idea
of an alphabet possible came at a very late stage of social evolution,
and as the culminating achievement of a long series of improvements
in the art of writing. The precise steps that marked this path of
intellectual development can for the most part be known only by
inference; yet it is probable that the main chapters of the story may be
reproduced with essential accuracy.

FIRST STEPS

For the very first chapters of the story we must go back in imagination
to the prehistoric period. Even barbaric man feels the need of
self-expression, and strives to make his ideas manifest to other men by
pictorial signs. The cave-dwellers scratched pictures of men and animals
on the surface of a reindeer horn or mammoth tusk as mementos of his
prowess. The American Indian does essentially the same thing to-day,
making pictures that crudely record his successes in war and the chase.
The Northern Indian had got no farther than this when the white man
discovered America; but the Aztecs of the Southwest and the Maya people
of Yucatan had carried their picture-making to a much higher state
of elaboration.(3) They had developed systems of pictographs or
hieroglyphics that would doubtless in the course of generations have
been elaborated into alphabetical systems, had not the Europeans cut off
the civilization of which they were the highest exponents.

What the Aztec and Maya were striving towards