be due to chance. And then, when a settlement of the dispute
seemed almost hopeless, it was shown through the Egyptian
excavations that characters even more closely resembling those in
dispute had been in use all about the shores of the
Mediterranean, quite independently of either Egyptian or Assyrian
writings, from periods so ancient as to be virtually prehistoric.

Coupled with this disconcerting discovery are the revelations
brought to light by the excavations at the sites of Knossos and
other long-buried cities of the island of Crete.[2] These
excavations, which are still in progress, show that the art of
writing was known and practised independently in Crete before
that cataclysmic overthrow of the early Greek civilization which
archaeologists are accustomed to ascribe to the hypothetical
invasion of the Dorians. The significance of this is that the art
of writing was known in Europe long before the advent of the
mythical Kadmus. But since the early Cretan scripts are not to be
identified with the scripts used in Greece in historical times,
whereas the latter are undoubtedly of lineal descent from the
Phoenician alphabet, the validity of the Kadmus legend, in a
modified form, must still be admitted.

As has just been suggested, the new knowledge, particularly that
which related to the great antiquity of characters similar to the
Phoenician alphabetical signs, is somewhat disconcerting. Its
general trend, however, is quite in the same direction with most
of the new archaeological knowledge of recent decades---that is
to say, it tends to emphasize the idea that human civilization in
most of its important elaborations is vastly older than has
hitherto been supposed. It may be added, however, that no
definite clews are as yet available that enable us to fix even an
approximate date for the origin of the Phoenician alphabet. The
signs, to which reference has been made, may well have been in
existence for thousands of years, utilized merely as property
marks, symbols for counting and the like, before the idea of
setting them aside as phonetic symbols was ever conceived.
Nothing is more certain, in the judgment of the present-day
investigator, than that man learned to write by slow and painful
stages. It is probable that the conception of such an analysis of
speech sounds as would make the idea of an alphabet possible came
at a very late stage of social evolution, and as the culminating
achievement of a long series of improvements in the art of
writing. The precise steps that marked this path of intellectual
development can for the most part be known only by inference; yet
it is probable that the main chapters of the story may be
reproduced with essential accuracy.


FIRST STEPS

For the very first chapters of the story we must go back in
imagination to the prehistoric period. Even barbaric man feels
the need of self-expression, and strives to make his ideas
manifest to other men by pictorial signs. The cave-dwellers
scratched pictures of men and animals on the surface of a
reindeer horn or mammoth tusk as mementos of his prowess. The
American Indian does essentially the same thing to-day, making
pictures that crudely record his successes in war and the chase.
The Northern Indian had got no farther than this when the white
man discovered America; but the Aztecs of the Southwest and the
Maya people of Yucatan had carried their picture- making to a
much higher state of elaboration.[3] They had developed systems
of pictographs or hieroglyphics that would doubtless in the
course of generations have been elaborated into alphabetical
systems, had not the Europeans cut off the civilization of which
they were the highest exponents.

What the Aztec and Maya were striving towards in the sixteenth
century A.D., various Oriental nations had attained at least five
or six thousand years earlier. In Egypt at the time of the
pyramid-builders, and in Babylonia at the same epoch, the people
had developed systems of writing that enabled them not merely to
present a limited range of ideas pictorially, but to express in
full elaboration and with finer shades of meaning all the ideas
that pertain to highly cultured existence. The man of that time
made records of military achievements, recorded the transactions
of every-day business life, and gave expression to his moral and
spiritual aspirations in a way strangely comparable to the manner
of our own time. He had perfected highly elaborate systems of
writing.


EGYPTIAN WRITING

Of the two ancient systems of writing just referred to as being
in vogue at the so-called dawnings of history, the more
picturesque and suggestive was the hieroglyphic system of the
Egyptians. This is a curiously conglomerate system of writing,
made up in part of symbols reminiscent of the crudest stages of
picture-writing, in part of symbols having the phonetic value of
syllables, and in part of true alphabetical letters. In a word,
the Egyptian writing represents in itself the elements of the
various stages through which the art of writing has developed.[4]
We must conceive that new features were from time to time added
to it, while the old features, curiously enough, were not given
up.

Here, for example, in the midst of unintelligible lines and
pot-hooks, are various pictures that are instantly recognizable
as representations of hawks, lions, ibises, and the like. It can


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