Well, putting some or all of these facts together, it suddenly flashed on some one that the oldest Greek letters might be nothing more or less than the Phoenician letters turned the other way. And when they came to examine the very oldest Greek inscriptions to be found, they discovered that this was the main difference between the two! The Greeks had borrowed the Phoenician letters and merely added some new characters to express sounds peculiar to their own tongue and neglected others that were of no service.
It was this alphabet that the Greek-Phoenicians brought to Italy. When, centuries later, Latins and Sabines and Etruscans and Oscans, banded together and formed the great city of Rome, it was this alphabet they inherited from their forefathers. Several of the letters which the Etruscans thought necessary to express sounds in their language, were dropped before the Romans came to power and produced their great poets and essayists.
So, now you know how the alphabet came to you, which the Irish monks taught our heathen forefathers. It came through the Latins from the people of Boeotia, or Greeks, who learned it from the Phoenicians.
But that great mercantile people, the Phoenicians, also left to the nations near their old home in Palestine, the same precious gift of an alphabet. Very old inscriptions in Hebrew, lately found, are seen to be written in almost the same alphabet as the Phoenician. Perhaps you are beginning to wonder how many peoples there are who owe their letters to that old sea-folk who were the traders, pirates, and buccaneers of the Mediterranean! There is the Hebrew, which people have called the alphabet of God, because the Holy Scriptures were written in it, and which was also used by magicians for their amulets and talismans; there is the Greek, in which the epics of Homer, the long poems of Hesiod, and the rhapsodies of Pindar were taken down; there is the Latin, in which all the wisdom of the ancients reached us; and there are all the differing alphabets, printed characters, and script handwritings of Europe and America! In fact, I could not tell you here, so numerous are they, the names of all the languages in Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, that were and are written in some alphabet, which traces its descent from the twenty-two Phoenician letters.