Complicated and difficult as this writing was, it was applied on a considerable scale in Assyria and Babylonia, and it remained in use even after the fall of the Babylonian empire, as is shown by bricks and tablets of the time of Cyrus, Cambyses, Artaxerxes I., and the Seleucidæ.[390] These are principally records of business or legal matters, of which, in this way, a selection has come down to us extending from the times of Hammurabi (p. 261) to the first century B.C. The Armenians adopted this system from the Babylonians and Assyrians; and they also made it shorter and simpler. In the same way the Medes and Persians borrowed it. But in the Persian inscriptions of the Achæmenids it has already become a mere phonetic mode of writing but little removed from an ordinary alphabet. Beyond doubt the Babylonian system was known to the Western Semitic tribes; it even passed over from Syria to Cyprus, where we find it assuming a peculiar form, and displaying throughout the character of a syllabic mode of writing. At the same time among the Syrians and Phenicians a cursive method was developed, just as in Egypt the hieratic writing grew up beside the hieroglyphic. This cursive writing of the Western Semitic nations has not, however, arisen out of the cuneiform symbols, but out of the hieratic writing of the Egyptians. The Phenicians must claim the merit of having abbreviated still further, for their own use, the cursive writing of the Egyptians. But the picture-symbols of the hieratic writing were not merely contracted and simplified; the mixture of pictorial, syllabic, and alphabetic symbols--beyond which the Egyptians did not rise--was abandoned, and then for the first time an alphabet was discovered. This Phenician alphabet was in use in Syria as early as the year 1000 B.C.[391] In Babylonia also this alphabetic writing was in use beside the cuneiform. We find it in Babylon side by side with the corresponding cuneiform on a weight, of which the inscription tells us: "Thirty minæ of standard weight: the palace of Irba Merodach (Marduk) king of Babylon." The exact date of this king cannot be ascertained: we only know that he must have belonged to the old kingdom. Assyrian weights with inscriptions in the Phenician alphabet, beside the cuneiform inscriptions, are found of the eighth century B.C., the time of King Tiglath Pilesar II., Shalmanesar IV., and Sennacherib.[392]