Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/81

Rh itself, we have seen, was regularly called by the Assyrians "The Land of the Hittites" and by no other title. And the Phœnicians had many of their chief mines in Hittite Asia Minor, and for them with their vast industries, sea-trade and far-flung colonies, east and west, the invention of a rapid method of writing for the keeping of their accounts and transacting their business was a very pressing practical necessity.

The personality of this great inventor who thus boldly discarded the old outworn syllabic system of writing with its cumbrous and intricate pictographic signs numbering many hundreds, in favour of this simple alphabetic method with about 24 simple signs seems after all to be found, in Cadmus, the great Phœnician sea-king and sea-emperor, himself. He was the traditional introducer of alphabetic writing into the Ægean and Greece, and if he were not actually the inventor himself it is strange that no other name is traditionally associated with this epoch-making achievement. And significantly the earliest-known alphabetic inscriptions belong to about the Cadmean epoch and no earlier.

The date of King Kadmos or Cadmus-the-Phœnician, as I have shown elsewhere, was contemporary with the Trojan War, in which his father, King Agenor of Tyre, was one of the leading heroes in the defence of Troy against the Achaian Greeks in that great fight for world empire, and was "in the foremost of the battle." In that war a brother of Cadmus was also a Trojan hero who was killed by Achilles. But Cadmus himself appears to have been regent in Tyre during his father's absence in Troy. That Cadmus was an adult at the time of the Trojan War is evident, not only from his brother being one of the warrior-chiefs, but from the tradition that Cadmus' daughter Ino saved Odysseus