scriptions; but in the earlier period the cuneiform
syllabary, and in the later the "Phoenician" alphabet, had obtained a
firm hold there, and we may be sure that no attempt was made to
substitute the Egyptian system for the latter. Cuneiform tablets in
Syria, however, seem almost confined to the period of the XVIIIth
Dynasty. Although it cannot be proved it seems quite possible that the
traders of Phoenicia and the Aegean adopted the papyrus and Egyptian
hieratic writing together, before the end of the New Kingdom, and
developed their "Phoenician" alphabet from the latter about 1000 B.C.
In very early times a number of systems of writing already reigned in
different countries forming a compact and not very large area--perhaps
from South Arabia to Asia Minor, and from Persia to Crete and Egypt.
Whether they all sprang from one common stock of picture-writing we
shall perhaps never know, nor can we as yet trace the influence which
one great system may have had on another, owing to the poverty of
documents from most of the countries concerned.

It is certain that in Egypt from the IVth Dynasty onwards the mode of
writing was essentially the same as that which was extinguished by the
fall of paganism in the 4th century A.D. Its elements in the
hieroglyphic form are pictorial, but each hieroglyph had one or more
well-defined functions, fixed by convention in such a manner that the
Egyptian language was expressed in writing word by word. Although a
picture sign may at times have embarrassed the skilled native reader
by offering a choice of fixed values or functions, it was never
intended to convey merely an idea, so as to leave to him the task of
putting the idea into his own words. How far this holds good for the
period before the IVth Dynasty it is difficult to say. The known
inscriptions of the earlier times are so brief and so limited in range
that the system on which they were written cannot yet be fully
investigated. As far back as the Ist Dynasty, phonograms (see below)
were in full use. But the spelling then was very concise: it is
possible that some of the slighter words, such as prepositions, were
omitted in the writing, and were intended to be supplied from the
context. As a whole, we gain the impression that a really distinct and
more primitive stage of hieroglyphic writing by a substantially vaguer
notation of words lay not far behind the time