Now this insatiable appetite of the Greek mind for thinking and philosophy is a phenomenon in the history of the Western outlook as sudden and unaccountable as the appearance of the Aryan peoples on the stage of history. As far back as the seventh or eighth century B.C. we find, side by side with the popular Greek mythology, a developed and intricate system of philosophy—a kind of language and thought, in fact, which, as the labyrinthine history of our own tongue is enough to show us, could not possibly have sprung up in the night. And in their writings the Greek philosophers themselves allude to sources from which they may well have taken the seeds of abstract thought. References are made as early as Pythagoras and as late as Plato to the priestly wisdom of Egypt; and when we remember that the time which elapsed between the rise of Egyptian civilization and the birth of Homer is about as long as the period between Homer’s day and our own, we need not be surprised. Moreover, we find some evidence of the debt to Egypt in our language. Two almost indispensable prerequisites for the development of philosophy are the art of writing and something to write upon. It is interesting, therefore, to observe that our word _alphabet_ comes to us, through Latin, from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet—‘alpha’ and ‘beta’—which are themselves in the first place Phoenician words. Greek mythology looked back to Cadmus, a Phoenician, as the founder of the alphabet, and it is now believed that the Semitic Phoenicians did indeed bring writing into Greece, and that they themselves took it from the ‘hieratic script’ or priestly writing of Egypt. _Jot_, in the phrase ‘jot or tittle’, is an English form invented by the translators of the Authorised Version for the Greek letter ‘iota’, which is also of Phoenician origin. _Bible_, on the other hand, is from the Greek ‘biblos’, which meant ‘the inner bark of the papyrus’, and so ‘a book’; and _paper_ was borrowed by the Angles and Saxons from Latin ‘papyrus’, itself a transliteration of the Greek ‘papuros’, meaning an Egyptian rush or flag, of which writing material was made. Both these words are thought to be of Egyptian origin.