The Greek term δέλτος, which was borrowed from the language of Canaan, is evidence that the tablet was once known to the Greeks. For the letters of the Phœnician and Greek alphabet rolls of papyrus or leather were needed; the fact that the writing material was a tablet and not a roll refers us back to Babylonia. With the introduction of the Phœnician letters the word δέλτος necessarily changed its meaning, and became synonymous with a wooden board. But it is possible that a reminiscence of its original signification is preserved in a famous passage of the _Iliad_ (vi. 169), where the later “board” has been substituted for the earlier “tablet.” Here we are told how Bellerophon carried with him to Lycia “baleful signs”--which may have been the pictographs of Krete or the Hittites, or even cuneiform characters--written upon “a folded board.” The expression would have most naturally originated in the folded clay tablet of early Babylonia, the inner tablet being enclosed in an envelope on which the address or a description of the contents of the document is written. On the literary side, however, this is the utmost contribution that we can claim for Babylonia to have made to historical Greece. In the sphere of religion it is possible that the anthropomorphism of Greece was influenced by the anthropomorphism of Babylonia through Asia Minor, where the rock sculptures of Boghaz Keui show how the primitive Hittite fetishes had become human deities like those of Chaldæa; in the sphere of philosophy Thales and Anaximander clothed in a Greek dress the cosmological theories of the Babylonians; and in the domain of art the heraldry and composite monsters of Babylonia made their way to Europe, while the Ionic artists of Ephesus carved ivories into forms so Oriental in character that similar figures found in the palace of Sargon have been pronounced to be the work of Phœnicians. But the literary culture of historical Greece did not begin until the tide of Babylonian influence had already rolled back from Western Asia, when the Phœnician alphabet had taken the place of the cuneiform syllabary in Syria, and the Hittite populations of Asia Minor had returned to their clumsy hieroglyphs. It is, however, remarkable how very nearly the cuneiform script became what the Phœnician alphabet has been called, “the mother of the alphabets of the world.” At one time it covered nearly the whole area of the civilized globe. A seal-cylinder with a cuneiform inscription in an unknown language has been discovered on the hills near Herat;[154] in the west its use extended as far as Cappadocia, perhaps further. Northward it made its home in Armenia; southward it obliged even the Egyptian Foreign Office to employ it for correspondence, while military scribes wrote in it their memoranda of the Pharaoh’s campaigns. In both Mitanni and Van the syllabary was on the high-road to becoming an alphabet; in Persia it actually became one.