ey were very unpleasant people and did not have a
single friend. Nevertheless they have rendered all coming generations
one service of the greatest possible value. They gave us our alphabet.

The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing, invented by
the Sumerians. But they regarded these pothooks as a clumsy waste
of time. They were practical business men and could not spend hours
engraving two or three letters. They set to work and invented a new
system of writing which was greatly superior to the old one. They
borrowed a few pictures from the Egyptians and they simplified a number
of the wedge-shaped figures of the Sumerians. They sacrificed the pretty
looks of the older system for the advantage of speed and they reduced
the thousands of different images to a short and handy alphabet of
twenty-two letters.

In due course of time, this alphabet travelled across the AEgean Sea and
entered Greece. The Greeks added a few letters of their own and carried
the improved system to Italy. The Romans modified the figures somewhat
and in turn taught them to the wild barbarians of western Europe. Those
wild barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason why this
book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin and not
in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the nail-script of the
Sumerians.

THE INDO-EUROPEANS

THE INDO-EUROPEAN PERSIANS CONQUER THE SEMITIC AND THE EGYPTIAN WORLD

THE world of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and Phoenicia had existed
almost thirty centuries and the venerable races of the Fertile Valley
were getting old and tired. Their doom was sealed when a new and
more energetic race appeared upon the horizon. We call this race the
Indo-European race, because it conquered not only Europe but also made
itself the ruling class in the country which is now known as British
India.

These Indo-Europeans were white men like the Semites but they spoke
a different language which is regarded as the common ancestor of all
European tongues with the exception of Hungarian and Finnish and the
Basque dialects of Northern Spain.

When we first hear of them, they had been living along the shores of the
Caspian Sea for many centuries. But one day they had packed their tents
and they had wandered forth in search of a new home. Some of them had
moved into the mountains of Central Asia and for many centuries they had
lived among the peaks which surround the plateau of Iran and tha