This process appears to have gone on independently in many parts of the world. In many places it never got to the point of an alphabet, and this arrest of development is not inconsistent with a high degree of civilization. The Chinese and Japanese script, for example, are to this day combinations of ideograms and phonograms. Three of the great peoples of antiquity carried this process nearly or quite to a conclusion, although the method followed and the results reached were quite different in the three cases. The three civilizations, of the Egyptians in the Nile Valley, the Assyrio-Babylonians in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the Cretans, centering in Crete but spreading extensively through the Mediterranean Basin, developed three great varieties of script. All started with pictures. The Egyptians continued to use the pictures in their formal inscriptions down to the Persian conquest in the 6th century B.C. This picture writing or hieroglyphic was well developed and in the phonogram stage about 5000 B.C. The formal picture writing of the hieroglyphic was admirably suited to formal inscriptions either carved in stone or painted on a variety of substances. It was not suited, however, to the more rapid work of the recorder, the correspondent, or the literary man. The scribes, or writers, therefore developed a highly abbreviated and conventionalized form of hieroglyphic which could be easily written with a reed pen on papyrus, a writing material to be described presently. The first specimens of papyrus, containing the earliest known specimens of this kind of writing, called hieratic, date from about 3550 B.C. Even the hieratic was too formal and cumbersome for the common people and was further abbreviated and conventionalized into an alphabet known as the demotic which was in common use among the Egyptians from about 1900 B.C. to 400 A.D. [Illustration: Names in hieroglyphic text of three of the most famous Pharaohs, Cheops, Thothmes III and Rameses II.]