Testimony as to the source of the alphabetic writing is available: "The vast majority of alphabets are descended from the so-called Phœnician which is the earliest known, and was in existence near a thousand years B. C., although it was probably influenced by the still more ancient syllabary script of the Assyrians, Babylonians, and the Sumerians on the one hand and the Egyptian pictographs on the other."[49] "The Phœnicians were certainly using it" (the alphabet) "with freedom in the ninth century B. C. According to the view accepted till recently, the alphabet was borrowed by the Phœnicians from the cursive (hieratic) form of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.... The more recent view is that of Dr. A. J. Evans who argues ingeniously that the alphabet was taken over from Crete by the 'Cherethites' and 'Pelethites' or Philistines, who established for themselves settlements on the coasts of Palestine. From them it passed to the Phœnicians, who were their near neighbors, if not their kinsfolk."[50] Of the alphabetic writing Professor Sayce says: "The history of our alphabet is a record of slow stages of growth, through which the idea of _sound_-writing has been evolved. The first effort to record an event, so as to make it widely known, would naturally be to draw a picture of it. A written word, let us remember, is the picture of a sound." And in the same connection, he says that the ancient Phœnicians (because they were the great traders and settlers of the early world) were most in need of a clear, precise, and _communicable_ method of writing. The alphabetic writing was such a method. The desire and necessity for a medium of _thought-exchange_ that might serve as the means of communicating ideas to persons at a distance, and by means of which information and desires might be exchanged independent of personal contact, probably led to the invention or expedited the development of the alphabetic writing, which differed from both the hieroglyphic and the cuneiform writings. This seems to have been the genesis of the alphabet; and the Phœnicians are commonly regarded as the first to have employed it for this purpose. At any rate an alphabetic form of writing by means of what has been designated an "ideographic alphabet," an alphabet expressing ideas by means of letters (whether original or an inheritance) was in use by the Phœnicians as early as about 1,000 B. C. In the estimate of scholars, all our alphabets (varying in the number of letters, respectively, from twenty-two in the Hebrew to forty-nine in the Sanscrit) have come down to our times, however circuitous may have been the route, by way of the old Phœnicians.