247. Phœnicians, Aramæans, Hebrews
Thus, the Phœnicians, or some Semitic people closely related and geographically near them, by 1000 B.C. developed, presumably out of one of the several part-phonetic or syllabic writings in use about or among them, the true alphabet (§ [134]). In the two or three centuries following, they established a commercial and maritime supremacy over the Mediterranean that led to the founding of Carthage, direct trade as far as Spain and indirect to Britain, and transmission of the alphabet and other knowledge to the Greeks.
Another trading people, although an inland one, were the Aramæans, Semites of the same wave as the Hebrews but established north of Palestine in Syria, with Damascus as their greatest center. Never more than a secondary political power, they penetrated other countries peacefully, brought in their system of measures and weights, their writing, and even their language. Assyria had become half Aramaic speaking by the time of her fall, and the every-day language of Palestine in the days of Jesus and for some centuries before was Aramaic. Aramæan script, a cursive form of the Phœnician alphabet, gradually replaced Cuneiform writing, first for business and then for official purposes, throughout western Asia and beyond. In the fourteenth century, the Syrian and Palestinian city rulers had written their reports and dispatches to the Egyptian overlord in Cuneiform, which a corps of clerks in the Foreign Office or Dependencies Department at Tell-el-Amarna transcribed into Hieroglyphic or Hieratic. In the fourth century, Persian officials were employing Aramæan for official communications. As the Cuneiform more and more died out, derivatives of Aramæan became the alphabets of Persia; of at least part and possibly the whole of India; of the Jews; of the Arabs; of the Nestorian Christians; and of the ancient Turks, the Mongols, and the Manchus. Practically all Asia except perhaps India, so far as it writes alphabetically, thus derives its letters from an Aramæan source (§ [146]).
Equally profound was the influence of the neighboring Hebrews in another phase of civilization. At the time they first entered history, about 1400 B.C., the Hebrews worshiped a tribal god Jahveh. They believed that there were many gods beside him, but that they were his people and he their god. A growing national consciousness led them more and more to emphasize the special relation between him and them, to the exclusion of worship of other deities which was constantly creeping in from their Canaanite, Phœnician, Aramæan, and Egyptian neighbors. Thus they grew into the stage of monolatry, or worship limited to one god. As however Assyria and Babylonia first threatened and then engulfed them, and their national impotence became more and more evident, they confided less in themselves, as they had done in the brief days of their little tenth century glory, and trusted increasingly in their god as their salvation. National hopes fell and divine ones rose; until the Hebrew people passed from thinking of the Lord as all powerful to thinking of him as one and sole: monotheism had evolved out of monolatry as this had grown out of a special tribal cult. Historically the monotheistic idea was not new. Ikhnaton of Egypt had proclaimed it more than half a thousand years before the Hebrew prophets. The concept may actually have been carried over; but it certainly drew sustenance of its own on Hebrew soil and first became established there as a cardinal, enduring element of a national civilization. The Hebrews adhered to monotheism with an ever-increasing insistence; until the concept was taken over by Christianity and Islam—two of the three great international religions; Buddhism, the third, being essentially atheistic. Here then is another tremendously spread cultural element of deep significance that originated as a local west Asiatic variant.