For the first phonetic alphabet it is generally supposed that we are indebted to the Phoenicians, an active, commercial people, who lived along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. They were a maritime nation and scattered their alphabet wherever they sailed, so that some kind of phonetic alphabet finally existed throughout the civilized world. Books among the ancients were very different from the books of the present. Paper has not been known long, nor, indeed, has the art of printing. When man began to preserve his thoughts and deeds in more permanent form than in the memory, various substances were used to write upon. Josephus, an historian of the Jews, mentions two columns, one of stone and the other of brick, upon which the children of Seth wrote accounts of their inventions and astronomical discoveries. Tablets of lead containing the works of Hesiod, a Greek writer, were deposited in the temple of the Muses in Boeotia. According to the Bible, the ten commandments which the Lord gave to Moses on Mount Sinai for the children of Israel were engraved on two tablets of stone; and the laws of Solon, the great Grecian law-giver, were carved on planks of wood. Sixty centuries ago on the banks of the Nile in northern Africa flourished the civilization of the Egyptians. There grew abundantly in Egypt a marsh reed called the papyrus. From the name of this plant is derived our word _paper_. The Egyptians made their books from the papyrus plant. With a sharp instrument they cut lengthwise strips through the stalk, put these strips together edge to edge, and on them at right angles, placed another layer of shorter strips. The two layers were then moistened with Nile water, pressed together, and left to dry. A leaf of writing material was thus produced. Any roughness on the surface of the sheet was polished away with some smooth instrument. A number of leaves were then glued together so as to form a long piece of the material. The Egyptians took reeds, dipped them in gum water colored with charcoal or with a kind of resinous soot, and wrote on the long papyrus strip. Sometimes ink was made of the cuttle fish or from lees of wine. After the papyrus had been written upon, it was rolled up and became an Egyptian book. Papyrus was used for writing material not only by the Egyptians but by the Greeks and the Romans also, and for a long time it was the chief substance used for writing throughout the civilized world. It continued in use to a greater or less extent till about the seventh century after Christ.