walls of Tiryns and Mycenæ, and sacked and gave those cities to the flames. Then began for Greece "the long dark ages, the mediæval epoch, out of which she emerges only in the Homeric Renaissance." The flower of the survivors of that dread time sought a new home east of the Ægean on the isles and shores of Ionia. There these exiles from Argolis laid the foundation of a culture whose influence will abide while the world stands, because Ionia remains the fatherland of all who hold dear what man has reached in art and literature, in science and philosophy. The fall of Mycenæ gave Phœnicia her opportunity, and she was quick to seize it in establishing depôts throughout the Ægean, and in securing the overlordship of the Mediterranean. But through her lack of political unity, and her dependence on mercenary aid when troubles came, finally she succumbed to the strong arm of the reinvigorated Greek. Between their rise and decline the Phœnicians had put the alphabet into, practically, its present form, and secured its adoption by the Greeks. But if they did not derive it from the Egyptian hieratic, whence came it? No definite answer is forthcoming, and perhaps never will be. Canon Rawlinson is not alone in thinking that it will probably never be settled whether the Phœnician characters are modifications of the Egyptian or the Hittite or of Cypriote, or mere abbreviated forms of a picture-writing peculiar to the Phœnicians. That opinion was expressed before the discovery of the Cretan pictographs and linear signs, and these have not settled the question. The Phœnicians came under various influences, and their adaptive character readily took the impress of their surroundings. Probably they had a long history before they appear in Syria. As Semites, they were presumably familiar with cuneiform. The Tyrian quarter at Memphis was one of many settlements where the Egyptian characters would be in use, or, at least, familiar. And when the Phœnicians came into the Ægean they found an ancient script whereby intercourse was facilitated along the Mediterranean, a script of which so pliant a people, eager for trade, would avail themselves. In view of all these probabilities, Mr. Evans remarks that it is at least worth while weighing "the possibility that the rudiments of the Phœnician writing may after all have come in part at least from the Ægean side. The more the relics of Mycenæan culture are revealed to us, the more we see how far ahead of their neighbours on the Canaanite coasts was the Ægean population in arts and civilisation." The spread of their commerce led them to seek plantations in the Nile Valley and the Mediterranean outlets of the Arabian and Red Sea trade. The position was the reverse of that which meets our eye at a later date. It was not Sidon that was then planting mercantile settlements on the coasts and islands of Greece." (_Jo. Hellen. Stud._, p. 368.) Whether, _per contra_, a Semitic element had been introduced into the Ægean