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The Iron Age 15
The Art of Writing. This wonderful art, enabling
one to communicate with people at great distances and
to perpetuate truth and knowledge, is one of the many
gifts that Europe owes to the East. On wild or savage
people it often gives the impression of witchcraft.
What amount of thought and effort must have been
given by numbers of men to invent this art, which
even a child can now learn in a short time !
Along the
eastern shores of the Mediterranean a thousand years
Kings’ Mounds, Old Uppsala.
before Christ the symbols were invented from which
our alphabet is derived. Other Oriental peoples had
in earlier days used a symbol for each word or syllable,
and to be able to read and write they had to have a
knowledge of thousands of signs. The new method
(Syrian) used a sign for each elementary sound, and,
hence, only some twenty signs were required. These
could be combined to form any word in the language.
This simplified method of writing was introduced
to the European peoples by the Phoenicians, the world’s
earliest traders, who also acquainted the West with
many other Oriental arts and inventions. This alpha-
bet first reached the Greeks, and from them it passed
to the Romans.
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