The epoch, indeed, in which he became a naturalised Phoenician coincides approximately with a fundamental revolution in the art of writing--that in which a simple and rapid stenography was substituted for the complicated and tedious systems with which the empires of the ancient world had been content from their origin. Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Arvad, had employed up to this period the most intricate of these systems. Like most of the civilized nations of Western Asia, they had conducted their diplomatic and commercial correspondence in the cuneiform character impressed upon clay tablets. Their kings had had recourse to a Babylonian model for communicating to the Amenôthes Pharaohs the expression of their wishes or their loyalty; we now behold them, after an interval of four hundred years and more*--during which we have no examples of their monuments--possessed of a short and commodious script, without the encumbrance of ideograms, determinatives, polyphony and syllabic sounds, such as had fettered the Egyptian and Chaldæan scribes, in spite of their cleverness in dealing with them. Phonetic articulations were ultimately resolved into twenty-two sounds, to each of which a special sign was attached, which collectively took the place of the hundreds or thousands of signs formerly required. * The inscription on the bronze cup dedicated to the Baal of the Lebanon, goes back probably to the time of Hiram I., say the Xth century before our era; the reasons advanced by Winckler for dating it in the time of Hiram II. have not been fully accepted up to the present. By placing the introduction of the alphabet somewhere between Amenôthes IV. in the XVth and Hiram I. in the Xth century before our era, and by taking the middle date between them, say the accession of the XXIs’dynasty towards the year 1100 B.C. for its invention or adoption, we cannot go far wrong one way or the other. [Illustration: 106.jpg ONE OF THE MOST ANCIENT PHOENICIAN INSCRIPTIONS] Drawn by Paucher-Gudin, from a heliogravure. This is the cup of the Baal of the Lebanon. This was an alphabet, the first in point of time, but so ingenious and so pliable that the majority of ancient and modern nations have found it able to supply all their needs--Greeks and Europeans of the western Mediterranean on the one hand, and Semites of all kinds, Persians and Hindus on the other. [Illustration: 107.jpg Table of Alphabets] It must have originated between the end of the XVIIIth and the beginning of the XXIst dynasties, and the existence of Pharaonic rule in Phoenicia during this period has led more than one modern scholar to assume that it developed under Egyptian influence.*