But as early as the ninth century B.C. we find several Semitic peoples in possession of an alphabet.[1] Through the agency of Phoenician and other traders this so-called Semitic alphabet was spread east and west, and became the parent of most of the existing alphabets of the world (sec. 93).
With the invention of phonetic writing and the practice of keeping records, with names of actors and dates of events, the truly historic age for man begins.
13. The Great Bequest.—We of this twentieth century esteem ourselves fortunate in being the heirs of a noble heritage,—the inheritors of the precious accumulations of all the past centuries of history. We are not used to thinking of the men of the first generation of historic times as also the heirs of a great legacy. But even the scanty review we have made of what was discovered, invented, and thought out by man during the unmeasured epochs before history began cannot fail to have impressed us with the fact that a vast estate was transmitted by prehistoric to historic man.
If our hasty glance at those far-away times has done nothing more than this, then we shall never again regard history quite as may have been our wont. We shall see everything in a new light. We shall see the story of man to be more wonderful than we once thought, the path which he has followed to be longer and more toilsome than we ever imagined.
But our interest in the traveler will have been deepened through our knowing more of his origin, of his early hard and narrow life, and of his first painful steps in the path of civilization. We shall follow with deeper interest and sympathy this wonderful being, child of earth and child of heaven, this heir of all the ages, as he journeys on and upward with his face toward the light.
- ↑ Our earliest inscriptions in the North Semitic alphabet date from the ninth century B.C.; but they show unmistakably that this script had then been in use for a considerable time. We probably possess South Arabian inscriptions written already in the fourteenth century B.C. While some scholars regard the Southern alphabet as a modification of the Northern, others consider both as independent adaptations of an earlier alphabetic script and are inclined to look to some of the Ægeo-Cretan systems of writing for a clew to the origin of the alphabet.
