=The Alphabet.=—­At the same time they exported their alphabet.  The Phoenicians did not invent writing.  The Egyptians knew how to write many centuries before them, they even made use of letters each of which expressed its own sound, as in our alphabet.  But their alphabet was still encumbered with ancient signs which represented, some a syllable, others an entire word.  Doubtless the Phoenicians had need of a simpler system for their books of commerce.  They rejected all the syllabic signs and ideographs, preserving only twenty-two letters, each of which marks a sound (or rather an articulation of the language).  The other peoples imitated this alphabet of twenty-two letters.  Some, like the Jews, wrote from right to left just as the Phoenicians themselves did; others, like the Greeks, from left to right.  All have slightly changed the form of the letters, but the Phoenician alphabet is found at the basis of all the alphabets—­Hebrew, Lycian, Greek, Italian, Etruscan, Iberian, perhaps even in the runes of the Norse.  It is the Phoenicians that taught the world how to write.

FOOTNOTES: 

[37] Renan ("Mission de Phenicio,” p. 818) says, “I noticed at Tripolis a sarcophagus serving as a public fountain and the sculptured face of it was turned to the wall.  I was told that a governor had placed it thus so as not to provide distractions for the inhabitants.”

[38] See ch. xxiii.

[39] See chs. xxvi., xxvii., xxviii.

[40] These idols, one of their principal exports, are found wherever the Phoenicians traded.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HEBREWS

ORIGIN OF THE HEBREW PEOPLE

=The Bible.=—­The Jews united all their sacred books into a single aggregation which we call by a Greek name the Bible, that is to say, the Book.  It is the Book par excellence.  The sacred book of the Jews became also the sacred book of the Christians.  The Bible is at the same time the history of the Jewish nation, and all that we know of the sacred people we owe to the sacred books.

=The Hebrews.=—­When the Semites had descended from the mountains of Armenia into the plains of the Euphrates, one of their tribes, at the time of the first Chaldean empire, withdrew to the west, crossed the Euphrates, the desert, and Syria and came to the country of the Jordan beyond Phoenicia.  This tribe was called the Hebrews, that is to say, the people from beyond the river.  Like the majority of the Semites they were a race of nomadic shepherds.  They did not till the soil and had no houses; they moved from place to place with their herds of cattle, sheep, and camels, seeking pasturage and living in tents as the Arabs of the desert do to this day.  In the book of Genesis one has a glimpse of this nomad life.