The soil of Phoenicia Proper, and of the various countries where the Phoenicians established settlements or factories, as Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Southern Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, has also yielded a large crop of somewhat brief legends, the "inscription of Marseilles"[0134] being the most important of them.
Finally there have been found within the last few years, in Phoenicia itself, near Byblus and Sidon, the three most valuable inscriptions of the entire series--those of Jehavmelek, Esmunazar and Tabnit--which have enabled scholars to place the whole subject on a scientific basis.
It is now clear that the same, or nearly the same, alphabet was in use from a very early date over the greater part of Western Asia--in Phoenicia, Moab, Judaea, Samaria, Lycia, Caria, Phrygia, &c .-- that it was adopted, with slight alterations only, by the Etruscans and the Greeks, and that from them it was passed on to the nations of modern Europe, and acquired a quasi-universality.

The invention of this alphabet was, by the general consent of antiquity, ascribed to the Phoenicians;[0135] and though, if their claim to priority of discovery be disputed, it is impossible to prove it, their practical genius and their position among the nations of the earth are strong subsidiary arguments in support of the traditions.
The Phoenician alphabet, or the Syrian script, as some call it,[0136] did not obtain its general prevalence without possessing some peculiar merits.

Its primary merit was that of simplicity.

The pictorial systems of the Egyptians and the Hittites required a hand skilled in drawing to express them; the cuneiform syllabaries of Babylonia, Assyria, and Elam needed an extraordinary memory to grasp the almost infinite variety in the arrangement of the wedges, and to distinguish each group from all the rest; even the Cypriote syllabary was of awkward and unnecessary extent, and was expressed by characters needlessly complicated.

The Phoenician inventor, whoever he was, reduced letters to the smallest possible number, and expressed them by the simplest possible forms.
Casting aside the idea of a syllabary, he reduced speech to its ultimate elements, and set apart a single sign to represent each possible variety of articulation, or rather each variety of which he was individually cognisant.