Among the Assyrio-Babylonians the use of an entirely different kind of writing material caused the development of a very different type of script. The lands inherited by these people were clay lands and they made enormous use of clay and its products for building materials, utensils, and also writing material. The early inhabitants of this region very soon found that a permanent record could be made by marking a lump of soft clay with a sharp stick and then drying it in the sun or baking it in an oven. Naturally the picture very soon degenerated into a series of marks made by holding the stick, or pointed implement, nearly parallel to the clay and then thrusting it into the surface. The resultant mark was like the following: [Illustration: cuneiform] This script is called "cuneiform," from two Latin words meaning "wedge shaped," from the obvious resemblance of the marks to wedges. The number and arrangement of these marks developed successively into phonograms, ideograms, and letters. The language, which was very complicated in its written form, retained all three to the last. [Illustration: First line of a cuneiform inscription commemorating victory of Shalmaneser over Hazael, King of Syria.] The Cretan civilization has been unknown to us save through a few uncertain references in Greek literature until within about twenty years. Within that time many excavations have been made, many objects recovered, and much progress made in the reconstruction of this ancient civilization. The written language has been at least partially recovered, although we are not sure that we have all the signs and we do not know how to read any of them. These signs were of two sorts, described as hieroglyphic and linear. The hieroglyphic signs are either ideograms or phonograms. Whether the linear signs are a true alphabet or a syllabary (each sign representing a complete syllable) we do not know. These linear signs have close relations on one hand to the signs used in the island of Cyprus, which we know to have been a syllabary, and on the other to the signs used by the Phoenicians, which we know to have been an alphabet.