We have already seen that the coast of the Delta was so thickly peopled with Phœnician settlers as to have acquired the name of Keft-ur, or Caphtor, “greater Phœnicia;” and these settlers it must have been who first borrowed the alphabet of their Egyptian neighbours. For purposes of trade they must have needed some kind of writing, by means of which they could communicate with the natives of the country, and their business-like instincts led them to adopt only the alphabet used by the latter, and to discard all the cumbrous machinery of ideographs and syllabic characters by which it was accompanied. It was doubtless in the time of the Hyksos that the Egyptian alphabet became Phœnician. From the Delta it was handed on to the mother country of Phœnicia, and there the letters received new names, derived from objects to which they bore a resemblance and which began with the sounds they represented. These names, as well as the characters to which they belonged, have descended to ourselves, for the Phœnician alphabet passed first from the Phœnicians to the Greeks, then from the Greeks to the Romans, and finally from the Romans to the nations of modern Europe. The very word _alphabet_ is a living memorial of the fact, since it is composed of _alpha_ and _beta_, the Greek names of the two first letters, and these names are simply the Phœnician _aleph_, “an ox,” and _beth_, “a house.” Just as in our own nursery days it was imagined that we should remember our lessons better if we were taught that “A was an Archer who shot at a frog,” so the forms of the letters were impressed on the memory of the Phœnician boys by being likened to the head of an ox or the outline of a house. But before the alphabet was communicated to Greece by the Phœnician traders, it had already been adopted by their Semitic kinsmen in Western Asia. Excavations in Palestine and the country east of the Jordan would doubtless bring to light inscriptions compiled in it much older than the oldest which we at present know. Only a few years ago the gap between the time when the Phœnicians first borrowed their new alphabet and the time to which the earliest texts written in it belonged was very great indeed. But during the last fifteen years two discoveries have been made which help to fill it up, and prove to us at the same time what may be found if we will only seek. [Illustration.] The Moabite Stone, erected by King Mesha, at Dibon.