A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



the introduction of an alphabet, thinking it am- 

 biguous. 



Yet, in the end, conservatism always yields, and so 

 it was with opposition to the alphabet. Once the 

 idea of the consonant had been firmly grasped, the 

 old syllabary was doomed, though generations of time 

 might be required to complete the obsequies genera- 

 tions of time and the influence of a new nation. We 

 have now to inquire how and by whom this advance 

 was made. 



THE ALPHABET ACHIEVED 



We cannot believe that any nation could have 

 vaulted to the final stage of the simple alphabetical 

 writing without tracing the devious and difficult way 

 of the pictograph and the syllabary. It is possible, 

 however, for a cultivated nation to build upon the 

 shoulders of its neighbors, and, profiting by the ex- 

 perience of others, to make sudden leaps upward and 

 onward. And this is seemingly what happened in the 

 final development of the art of writing. For while 

 the Babylonians and Assyrians rested content with 

 their elaborate syllabary, a nation on either side of 

 them, geographically speaking, solved the problem, 

 which they perhaps did not even recognize as a problem ; 

 wrested from their syllabary its secret of consonants 

 and vowels, and by adopting an arbitrary sign for each 

 consonantal sound, produced that most wonderful of 

 human inventions, the alphabet. 



The two nations credited with this wonderful 

 achievement are the Phoenicians and the Persians. 

 But it is not usually conceded that the two are en- 



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