The People Who Made Our A B C’s
Long before people knew how to write, there lived a carpenter named Cadmus. One day he was at work on a house when he wanted a tool that he had left at home. Picking up a chip of wood, he wrote something on it and, handing it to his slave, told him to go to his home and give the chip to his wife, saying that it would tell her what he wanted. The slave, wondering, did as he was told. Cadmus’s wife looked at the chip, and without a word handed the tool to the amazed slave, who thought the chip in some mysterious way had spoken the message. When he returned to Cadmus with the tool, he begged for the remarkable chip, and when it was given him, hung it around his neck for a charm.
Cadmus’ slave and the chip.
This is the story the Greeks told of the man they say invented the alphabet. We believe, however, that Cadmus was a mythical person, for the Greeks liked to make up such stories, and we think no one man made the alphabet. But Cadmus was a Phenician and we do know that the Phenician people invented the alphabet. You probably call it your A B C’s, but the Greeks had much harder names for the letters. They called A “alpha,” B “beta,” and so on. So the Greek boy spoke of learning his “alpha beta,” and that is why we call it the “alphabet.”
You may never have heard of Phenicia or the Phenician people. Yet, if there had been no such country as Phenicia, you might now be learning at school to read and write in hieroglyphics or in cuneiform.
Up to this time, you know, people had very clumsy ways of writing. The Egyptians had to draw pictures, and the Babylonians made writing like chicken-tracks. The alphabet that the Phenicians invented had twenty-two letters, and from it we get the alphabet we use to-day.
Of course, we do not use just the same alphabet now that the Phenicians did, but some of the letters are almost, if not quite, like those we now have after three thousand years. For instance the
| Phenician A | was | written | on its side | —𐤀 |
| E | " | " | backward | —Ǝ |
| Z | " | " | just the same | Z |
| O | " | " | " " " | O |
The Phenicians lived next door to the Jews; in fact they belonged to the same family—the Semites. Their country was just north of the kingdom of the Jews; that is, above it on the map and lying along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.