Two facts must first be kept well in view. One of these is the Semitic origin of the Greek alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet, originally derived from the alphabet of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and imported into their mother-country by the Phoenician settlers of the Delta, was brought to Greece, not probably by the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, but by the Aramaeans of the Gulf of Antioch, whose nouns ended with the same "emphatic aleph" that we seem to find in the Greek names of the letters, _alpha_, _beta_, _gamma_, (_gamla_). Before the introduction of the simpler Phoenician alphabet, the inhabitants of Asia Minor and the neighbouring islands appear to have used a syllabary of some seventy characters, which continued to be employed in conservative Cyprus down to a very late date; but, so far as we know at present, the Greeks of the mainland were unacquainted with writing before the Aramaeo-Phoenicians had taught them their phonetic symbols. The oldest Greek inscriptions are probably those of Thera, now Santorin, where the Phoenicians had been settled from time immemorial; and as the forms of the characters found in them do not differ very materially from the forms used on the famous Moabite Stone, we may infer that the alphabet of Kadmus was brought to the West at a date not very remote from that of Mesha and Ahab, perhaps about 800 B.C. We may notice that Thera was an island and a Phoenician colony, and it certainly seems more probable that the alphabet was carried to the mainland from the islands of the AEgean than that it was disseminated from the inland Phoenician settlement at Thebes, as the old legends affirmed. In any case, the introduction of the alphabet implies a considerable amount of civilizing force on the part of those from whom it was borrowed; the teachers from whom an illiterate people learns the art of writing are generally teachers from whom it has previously learnt the other elements of social culture. A barbarous tribe will use its muscles in the service of art before it will use its brains; the smith and engraver precede the scribe. If, therefore, the Greeks were unacquainted with writing before the ninth century, B.C., objects older than that period may be expected to exhibit clear traces of Phoenician influence, though no traces of writing.