The advantages of simplicity and clearness had been less felt by Egyptian priests while inscribing their stately records on walls of temples and palaces, and on the tapering sides of obelisks which were meant to lift sacred words up to the eye of Heaven rather than to expose them to those of men. They believed that a race of priests would continue, as long as the temples and obelisks continued, who could explain the writing to those worthy to enter into its mysteries; and they were not sorry, perhaps, to keep the distinction of understanding the art of letters to their own caste.
It was not till letters were needed by busy people, who had other things to do besides studying, that the necessity for making them easy to learn, and really effective as carriers of thought across distances, was sincerely felt. Two conjectures as to the method pursued by the Phœnicians in choosing their letters and adapting them to their own language have been made by the learned. One is, that while they took the forms of their letters from the Egyptian system of signs, and adopted the principle of making each picture of an object stand for the first sound of its name, as _labo_ for _l_, they did not give to each letter the value it had in the Egyptian alphabet, but allowed it to mean for them the first sound of its name in their own language. For example, they took the sign for an ox’s head and made it stand for the sound _a_, not because it was one of the Egyptian signs for ‘_a_’ but because Aleph was the name for an ox and ‘_a_’ was its first syllable. This, which seems a natural method enough, is, however, not the method which was followed by the Japanese in choosing their alphabet from signs; and more recent investigations prove such a close resemblance between the earliest forms of Phœnician letters, and early forms of signs for the same sounds in Hieratic character, that a complete descent in sound-bearing power, as well as in form, is now claimed for our letters from those hieroglyphics, which, in our ignorance of the relationship, we used to consider a synonymous term for something unintelligible. The Semitic language spoken by the Phœnicians was richer in sounds than the less developed language spoken by the ancient Egyptians; but as the Egyptians used several signs for each letter, the Phœnicians easily fell into the habit of giving a slightly different value to two forms originally identical, and thus provided for all the more delicate distinctions of their tongue. A close comparison of the forms of the letters of the earliest known Canaanite inscriptions with Hieratic writing of the time of the Old Empire reveals a resemblance so striking between fifteen of the Phœnician letters and Hieratic characters carrying the same sounds, that a conviction of the derivation of one from the other impresses itself on even a careless observer. The correspondence of the other five Canaanite letters with their Hieratic counterparts is less obvious to the uneducated eye, but experts in such investigations see sufficient likeness even there to confirm the theory.