So you see that the alphabet, which you learn at an age so early that you forget its difficulties, is perhaps the most curious and marvelous contrivance that has been produced by the brain of man. It is so old, that its origin is lost in the perspective of the past. To reconstruct its history is extremely difficult. The further back we go, the more confused are the records, and the scantier they become; but those which we find seem to point originally to a great variety of writings. The general history seems to be that of simpler from less simple—simpler pictures from complex pictures, simpler alphabets from alphabets more complex. Then a few chosen alphabets outlived all the rest; and finally one form, in great variation to be sure, rules now throughout a great portion of the whole world. This, as you have seen, is the alphabet which we share with so many nations of different speech, color, and ancestry. Still, only half satisfied with the derivation of this alphabet, we ask, whence did it come to the Phœnicians? Was it evolved on Egyptian soil? Or did the Phœnicians perfect it from some old syllabary like those which I have already described to you. A syllabary of the ancient Hittites of Palestine has just been discovered and partly made out. Attempts have been made to trace it to the cuneiform picture-writing at Babylon, which also I have told you about; and some have thought it may have been born in India, out of a vanished syllabary, and its origin completely forgotten because of wars and the destruction of monuments. Or perhaps some very early or forgotten emigration of people from Asia into Egypt may have carried with it a crude alphabet, which, after further changes, was carried by another and a seafaring people, the Phœnicians, to the nations about the Mediterranean. One of David’s captains was Uriah the Hittite. More and more is being learned nowadays about the Hittites, or Khetas, a Semitic nation that conquered and held Egypt for many centuries, long before David’s time. It is thought by some that Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery while the Hittites ruled over the patient Egyptians, who abhorred them and their gods. There seems to have been no difficulty on the part of Joseph and his brothers in making themselves understood by Potiphar and the Pharaoh that sat on the throne. If the ruling class was Semitic at the time, the court speech of the day was doubtless a dialect something like Hebrew, and this explains also why the starving sons of Jacob turned to Egypt for grain. The Hittites are considered the same people as the Khetas, the same also as the Shepherd Kings whom the Egyptians called the Hyksos. Perhaps it was during the reign of the Hyksos, or Hittites, and while the Hebrews were increasing mightily in numbers, and gradually falling under the displeasure of their rulers in Egypt, that the Phœnicians, their seafaring relatives, adapted those twenty-two letters from the great store of signs and symbols