ply a set of alphabetical characters;
though even here, it may be added parenthetically, a study of the
development of alphabets will show that mankind has all along had a
characteristic propensity to copy rather than to invent.

Regarding the Persian alphabet-maker, then, as a copyist rather than
a true inventor, it remains to turn attention to the Phoenician source
whence, as is commonly believed, the original alphabet which became "the
mother of all existing alphabets" came into being. It must be admitted
at the outset that evidence for the Phoenician origin of this alphabet
is traditional rather than demonstrative. The Phoenicians were the great
traders of antiquity; undoubtedly they were largely responsible for the
transmission of the alphabet from one part of the world to another, once
it had been invented. Too much credit cannot be given them for this; and
as the world always honors him who makes an idea fertile rather than the
originator of the idea, there can be little injustice in continuing
to speak of the Phoenicians as the inventors of the alphabet. But the
actual facts of the case will probably never be known. For aught we
know, it may have been some dreamy-eyed Israelite, some Babylonian
philosopher, some Egyptian mystic, perhaps even some obscure Cretan,
who gave to the hard-headed Phoenician trader this conception of a
dismembered syllable with its all-essential, elemental, wonder-working
consonant. But it is futile now to attempt even to surmise on such
unfathomable details as these. Suffice it that the analysis was made;
that one sign and no more was adopted for each consonantal sound of the
Semitic tongue, and that the entire cumbersome mechanism of the Egyptian
and Babylonian writing systems was rendered obsolescent. These systems
did not yield at once, to be sure; all human experience would have been
set at naught had they done so. They held their own, and much more than
held their own, for many centuries. After the Phoenicians as a nation
had ceased to have importance; after their original script had been
endlessly modified by many alien nations; after the original alphabet
had made the conquest of all civilized Europe and of far outlying
portions of the Orient--the Egyptian and Babylonian scribes continued to
indite their missives in the same old pictographs and syllables.

The inventive thinker must have been struck with amazement when, after
making the fullest analysis of speech-sounds of which