ch an idea expression. We can
imagine them saying: "You will oblige us to use four signs instead of
one to write such an elementary syllable as 'bard,' for example.
Out upon such endless perplexity!" Nor is such a suggestion purely
gratuitous, for it is an historical fact that the old syllabary
continued to be used in Babylon hundreds of years after the alphabetical
system had been introduced.(7) Custom is everything in establishing our
prejudices. The Japanese to-day rebel against the introduction of an
alphabet, thinking it ambiguous.

Yet, in the end, conservatism always yields, and so it was with
opposition to the alphabet. Once the idea of the consonant had been
firmly grasped, the old syllabary was doomed, though generations of time
might be required to complete the obsequies--generations of time and the
influence of a new nation. We have now to inquire how and by whom this
advance was made.

THE ALPHABET ACHIEVED

We cannot believe that any nation could have vaulted to the final stage
of the simple alphabetical writing without tracing the devious and
difficult way of the pictograph and the syllabary. It is possible,
however, for a cultivated nation to build upon the shoulders of its
neighbors, and, profiting by the experience of others, to make sudden
leaps upward and onward. And this is seemingly what happened in the
final development of the art of writing. For while the Babylonians and
Assyrians rested content with their elaborate syllabary, a nation on
either side of them, geographically speaking, solved the problem, which
they perhaps did not even recognize as a problem; wrested from their
syllabary its secret of consonants and vowels, and by adopting an
arbitrary sign for each consonantal sound, produced that most wonderful
of human inventions, the alphabet.

The two nations credited with this wonderful achievement are the
Phoenicians and the Persians. But it is not usually conceded that the
two are entitled to anything like equal credit. The Persians, probably
in the time of Cyrus the Great, used certain characters of the
Babylonian script for the construction of an alphabet; but at this time
the Phoenician alphabet had undoubtedly been in use for some centuries,
and it is more than probable that the Persian borrowed his idea of an
alphabet from a Phoenician source. And that, of course, makes all the
difference. Granted the idea of an alphabet, it requires no great reach
of constructive genius to sup