I have told you how the Egyptians preserved speech by means of little figures. I have described the wedge-shaped signs which served the people of Mesopotamia as a handy means of transacting business at home and abroad.

But how about our own alphabet? From whence came those compact little letters which follow us throughout our life, from the date on our birth certificate to the last word of our funeral notice? Are they Egyptian or Babylonian or Aramaic or are they something entirely different? They are a little bit of everything, as I shall now tell you.

Our modern alphabet is not a very satisfactory instrument for the purpose of reproducing our speech. Some day a genius will invent a new system of writing which shall give each one of our sounds a little picture of its own. But with all its many imperfections the letters of our modern alphabet perform their daily task quite nicely and fully as well as their very accurate and precise cousins, the numerals, who wandered into Europe from distant India, almost ten centuries after the first invasion of the alphabet. The earliest history of these letters, however, is a deep mystery and it will take many years of painstaking investigation before we can solve it.

This much we know--that our alphabet was not suddenly invented by a bright young scribe. It developed and grew during hundreds of years out of a number of older and more complicated systems.

In my last chapter I have told you of the language of the intelligent Aramaean traders which spread throughout western Asia, as an international means of communication. The language of the Phoenicians was never very popular among their neighbors. Except for a very few words we do not know what sort of tongue it was. Their system of writing, however, was carried into every corner of the vast Mediterranean and every Phoenician colony became a center for its further distribution.

It remains to be explained why the Phoenicians, who did nothing to further either art or science, hit upon such a compact and handy system of writing, while other and superior nations remained faithful to the old clumsy scribbling.

The Phoenicians, before all else, were practical business men. They did not travel abroad to admire the scenery. They went upon their perilous voyages to distant parts of Europe and more distant parts of Africa in search of wealth. Time was money in Tyre and Sidon and commercial documents written in hieroglyphics or Sumerian wasted useful hours of busy clerks who might be employed upon more useful errands.

When our modern business world decided that the old-fashioned way of dictating letters was too slow for the hurry of modern life, a clever man devised a simple system of dots and dashes which could follow the spoken word as closely as a hound follows a hare.

This system we call "shorthand."

The Phoenician traders did the same thing.

They borrowed a few pictures from the Egyptian hieroglyphics and simplified a number of wedge-shaped figures from the Babylonians.

They sacrificed the pretty looks of the older system for the benefit of speed and they reduced the thousands of images of the ancient world to a short and handy alphabet of only twenty-two letters. They tried it out at home and when it proved a success, they carried it abroad.

Among the Egyptians and the Babylonians, writing had been a very serious affair--something almost holy. Many improvements had been proposed but these had been invariably discarded as sacrilegious innovations. The Phoenicians who were not interested in piety succeeded where the others had failed. They could not introduce their script into Mesopotamia and Egypt, but among the people of the Mediterranean, who were totally ignorant of the art of writing, the Phoenician alphabet was a great success and in all nooks and corners of that vast sea we find vases and pillars and ruins covered with Phoenician inscriptions.

The Indo-European Greeks who had migrated to the many islands of the Aegean Sea at once applied this foreign alphabet to their own language. Certain Greek sounds, unknown to the ears of the Semitic Phoenicians, needed letters of their own. These were invented and added to the others.

But the Greeks did not stop at this.

They improved the whole system of speech-recording.

All the systems of writing of the ancient people of Asia had one thing in common.

The consonants were reproduced but the reader was forced to guess at the vowels.

This is not as difficult as it seems.

We often omit the vowels in advertisements and in announcements which are printed in our newspapers. Journalists and telegraph operators, too, are apt to invent languages of their own which do away with all the superfluous vowels and use only such consonants as are necessary to provide a skeleton around which the vowels can be draped when the story is rewritten.

But such an imperfect scheme of writing can never become popular, and the Greeks, with their sense of order, added a number of extra signs to reproduce the "a" and the "e" and the "i" and the "o" and the "u." When this had been done, they possessed an alphabet which allowed them to write everything in almost every language.

Five centuries before the birth of Christ these letters crossed the Adriatic and wandered from Athens to Rome.

The Roman soldiers carried them to the furthest corners of western Europe and taught our own ancestors the use of the little Phoenician signs.

Twelve centuries later, the missionaries of Byzantine took the alphabet into the dreary wilderness of the dark Russian plain.

Today more than half of the people of the world use this Asiatic alphabet to keep a record of their thoughts and to preserve a record of their knowledge for the benefit of their children and their grandchildren.