But the surpassing interest which the Moabite Stone possesses for the antiquarian is not its corroboration of remote Israelitish history or the substantial identity of its letters with the Hebrew forms, but, rather, its contribution to all alphabetic literature of all the past. This will appear in a quotation from the late Wm. Frost Bishop, D.D.: "The essential features in the outline of each of our own letters may be detected easily in the characters of the Moabite Stone, written 2,900 years ago.... The primitive Semitic inscription of this stone contains the alphabet from which all existing alphabets have been derived. It exhibits the embryo forms of all the letters--2,000 or 3,000 in number--in every one of the alphabets which are now in use throughout the world. It might thus be termed the great mother alphabet of the world."[53] The Moabite Stone in itself would seem to indicate a more or less general as well as an understanding use of the alphabet in which it is inscribed throughout that region at an early date--perhaps at a much earlier date than that of the inscription--as the Code of Hammurabi, set up at Susa in Persia, indicates a more or less general acquaintance with the cuneiform characters in which the laws of that ancient monarch were promulgated. Supporting this conclusion, Mr. E. C. Richardson holds that there is "growing evidence of the prevailing use of handwriting all over Palestine, by not later than the ninth century."[54] Professor Sayce, referring to the criticism that would deny the pre-exilic origin of the larger part of the Old Testament literature on the ground that the early Israelites could not read or write, says: "This supposed late use of writing for literary purposes was merely an assumption, with nothing more solid to rest upon than the critic's own theories and prepossessions. And as soon as it could be tested by solid fact it crumbled into dust."[55]