we may find many of these also in the Kretan
inscriptions long before 800 B.C. The only conclusion then seems to
be that a great body of signs--or a _signary_--was in use around the
Mediterranean for several thousand years. Whether these signs were
ideographic or syllabic or alphabetic in the early stages we do not
know; certainly they were alphabetic in the later stage. And the
identity of most of the signs in Asia Minor and Spain shows them to
belong to a system with commonly received values in the later times.

What then becomes of the Phoenician legend of the alphabet? Certainly
the so-called Phoenician letters were familiar long before the rise of
Phoenician influence. What is really due to the Phoenicians seems to
have been the selection of a short series (only half the amount of the
surviving alphabets) for numerical purposes, as A = 1, E = 5, I = 10, N
= 50, P = 100.

[Illustration: 309.jpg TABLE OF COMPARATIVE SYMBOLS]

This usage would soon render these signs as invariable in order as our
own numbers, and force the use of them on all countries with which the
Phoenicians traded. Hence, before long these signs drove out of use
all others, except in the less changed civilisations of Asia Minor and
Spain. According to our modern authorities this exactly explains the
phenomena of the early Greek alphabets; many in variety, and so diverse
that each has to be learned separately, and yet entirely uniform in
order. Each tribe had its own signs for certain sounds, varying a good
deal; yet all had to follow a fixed numerical system. Certainly all did
not learn their forms from an independent Phoenician alphabet, unknown
to them before it was selected.

The work of Young and Champollion, says Doctor Williams,* gives a new
interest to the mass of records, in the form of graven inscriptions, and
papyrus rolls, and cases and wrappings, which abound in Egypt, but which
hitherto had served no better purpose for centuries than to excite,
without satisfying, the curiosity of the traveller.

* History of the Art of Writing, Portfolio I., plate 8.

Now these strange records, so long enigmatic, could be read, and within
the past fifty years a vast literature of translations of these Egyptian
records has been given to the world. It was early discovered that the
hieroglyphic character was not reserved solely for sacred inscriptions,
as the Greeks had supposed in naming it; indeed, the inscription of the
Rosetta Stone suffi