The Age of the Nobles and the Tyrants in Greece 1 39 The Greek now received from the Phoenician a priceless gift, The Greeks far more valuable than all the manufactured wares of the Orient. phSJnfcian This new gift was an alphabet. Until long after 1000 B.C. the ^^P^^^et Greek was as unable to write as he had been on the grasslands of inner Asia fifteen hundred years earlier. The Orient, how- Qver, as we have seen (pp. 21, 62), had been writing for several thousand years. The Phoenician merchant had by this time long abandoned the inconvenient Babylonian clay tablet (p. 62). About 1000 B.C. he or his kinsmen had developed an alphabet of twent}-two consonants but still without any signs for the vowels-^ (p. 71). For several centuries the Phoenicians of the cit}' of Byblos had been importing the Eg}^'ptian papyrus paper (p. 22), on which they wrote with their new alphabet.'^ The Greek merchant, thumbing the bits of papyrus bearing the Phoenician tradesman's written list of goods, finally learned the alphabet in which it was written, and slowly began to note down Greek words in the same way. Here the Greek soon displayed his usual mental superiority ; for, finding signs for certain Phoe- nician sounds which did not occur in Greek and were there- • fore superfluous to him, he used these signs for the Greek vowels and thus perfected the first complete system of alpha- Greek in betic writing. It slowly spread among the Greek states, begin- letterT- 'the nino^ in Ionia. It lon^: remained only a convenience in business ^^i^Jl^st tJ tn J writing on and administration. For centuries the nobles, unable to read European or wTite, regarded writing with misgivings. The Homeric songs (p. 142), which were at first not written but were handed down orally from generation to generation, speak of the *' deadly signs " used in writing. But even the painters of pottery jars had learned to use it by 700 B.C., when we find it on their decorated vases (compare Fig. 75). Shortly after this it was common 1 They probably devised it, by adaptation from Egyptian signs, or at least under their influence. 2 It is important to notice that all the alphabets of western Asia and all the alphabets of European countries, including our own alphabet, are descended from this old Phoenician alphabet. The student should recall its adoption by the Arameans (p. 71) and its spread eastward under the Persians (p. 98). continent
