is uncertain, but could this be proved, the presence of similarities between the respective scripts would have easy explanation. Putting together, however, what is no longer conjectural, it would seem that the Phœnician alphabet was a compound from various sources, the selection and modification of the several characters being ruled by convenience, and that, primarily and essentially, commercial. Like all business people immersed in many transactions, their method was brevity, and so they aimed as near "shorthand" as they could. They got rid of surplus signs, of the lumber of determinatives and the like, and invented an alphabet which if it was not perfect (as no alphabet can be, because the letters are not revised from time to time to represent changes in sound), was of such signal value as to have been accepted by the civilised world of the past, and to have secured, with but slight modifications, a permanence assured to no other invention of the human race. Therefore, the debt that we owe these old traders is in nowise lessened because the current theory of derivation of our alphabet is doubted. This theory as to the nature of the service rendered by the Phœnicians has corroboration in an ancient Cretan tradition recorded by Diodôros, a contemporary of Julius Cæsar and Augustus, to which Mr. Evans makes reference in the reprint of his essay. According to that tradition, the Phœnicians had not invented written characters, but had simply "changed their shapes." In other words, they had not done more than improve on an existing system, which is precisely what recent evidence goes to show. "We may infer from the Cretan contention recorded by Diodôros that the Cretans claimed to have been in possession of a system of writing before the introduction of the Phœnician alphabet. The present discovery on Cretan soil both of a pictographic and a linear script dating from times anterior to any known Phœnician contact thus affords an interesting corroboration of this little regarded record of an ancient writer." (_Cretan Pictographs_, p. 372.) CHAPTER X GREEK PAPYRI