It is now clear that the same, or nearly the same, alphabet was in use from a very early date over the greater part of Western Asia—­in Phoenicia, Moab, Judaea, Samaria, Lycia, Caria, Phrygia, &c.—­that it was adopted, with slight alterations only, by the Etruscans and the Greeks, and that from them it was passed on to the nations of modern Europe, and acquired a quasi-universality.  The invention of this alphabet was, by the general consent of antiquity, ascribed to the Phoenicians;[0135] and though, if their claim to priority of discovery be disputed, it is impossible to prove it, their practical genius and their position among the nations of the earth are strong subsidiary arguments in support of the traditions.

The Phoenician alphabet, or the Syrian script, as some call it,[0136] did not obtain its general prevalence without possessing some peculiar merits.  Its primary merit was that of simplicity.  The pictorial systems of the Egyptians and the Hittites required a hand skilled in drawing to express them; the cuneiform syllabaries of Babylonia, Assyria, and Elam needed an extraordinary memory to grasp the almost infinite variety in the arrangement of the wedges, and to distinguish each group from all the rest; even the Cypriote syllabary was of awkward and unnecessary extent, and was expressed by characters needlessly complicated.  The Phoenician inventor, whoever he was, reduced letters to the smallest possible number, and expressed them by the simplest possible forms.  Casting aside the idea of a syllabary, he reduced speech to its ultimate elements, and set apart a single sign to represent each possible variety of articulation, or rather each variety of which he was individually cognisant.  How he fixed upon his signs, it is difficult to say.  According to some, he had recourse to one or other of previously existing modes of expressing speech, and merely simplified the characters which he found in use.  But there are two objections to this view.  First, there is no known set of characters from which the early Phoenician can be derived with any plausability.  Resemblances no doubt may be pointed out here and there, but taking the alphabet as a whole, and comparing it with any other, the differences will always be quite as numerous and quite as striking as the similarities.  For instance, the writer of the article on the “Alphabet” in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” (1876) derives the Phoenician letters from letters used in the Egyptian hieratic writing,[0137] but his own table shows a marked diversity in at least eleven instances, a slight resemblance in seven or eight, a strong resemblance in no more than two or three.  Derivation from the Cypriote forms has been suggested by some; but here again eight letters are very different, if six or seven are similar.  Recently, derivation from the Hittite hieroglyphs has been advocated,[0138] but the alleged instances of resemblance touch nine characters only out of the twenty-two.  And real