called the camp of the Tyrians," or, as we should say, the Tyrian quarter (Herodotus, ii. 112). Obviously, one of the pressing needs of a people thus brimful of commercial activity, to whom "time was money," would be some swift and concise mode of record of transactions. Hence the supersession or abbreviation of cumbrous and elaborated characters, with their apparatus of determinatives, ideograms, and the like, by a simple "shorthand" sort of script. But of _what_ characters? Influenced partly by the traditions already referred to, partly by the fact of the intimate relations between Phœnicia and Egypt, and doubtless by that principle of development the application of which was extending in all directions, a French Egyptologist, Emanuel de Rougé, read a paper on the history of the alphabet before the Académie des Inscriptions in 1859 (the year of publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_), which, in the judgment of many scholars, appeared conclusive as to the derivation of the Phœnician (and, through that, of all other alphabets now in use) from the Egyptian characters. The success which appeared to attend M. de Rougé's researches "must be attributed to his clear perception of the fact, itself antecedently probable, that the immediate prototypes of the Semitic letters must be sought, not, as had hitherto been vainly attempted, among the hieroglyphic pictures of the Egyptian monuments, but among the cursive characters which the Egyptians had developed out of their hieroglyphs, and which were employed for literary and secular purposes, the hieroglyphic writing being reserved for monumental and sacred uses" (Taylor, i. p. 90). The method which he adopted was admirable. He took the oldest known forms of the Semitic letters that he could discover, and compared these with the oldest known forms of hieratic writing, confining that comparison to the twenty-five letters of the so-called "Egyptian Alphabet." The materials at his command were of the scantiest. On the _Egyptian_ side hieratic papyri of the new Empire (which began about 1587 B.C.) existed in plenty, but the characters in which they are written are comparatively late. Fortunately, however, among the very few examples of the oldest form of hieratic was the _Papyrus Prisse_ (fig. 50), and this precious relic supplied M. de Rougé with the cursive characters which made formulation of his theory possible. On the _Semitic_ side there are the Egyptian words which are given in Semitic form in the Old Testament, and the Semitic names of Syrian towns which are found in the Egyptian annals of conquests under the new Empire, through which the sounds severally represented by the Semitic and hieratic characters are arrived at. The chief source of epigraphic evidence was an inscription (fig. 51) on the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar, king of Sidon, dating from the fifth century B.C., or about two thousand years later than the _Papyrus Prisse_, and therefore representing a late form of the Phœnician alphabet.