The Greeks allow themselves to have been indebted to the Phoenicians for alphabetic writing, for advances in metallurgy, for improvements in shipbuilding, and navigation, for much geographic knowledge, for exquisite dyes, and for the manufacture of glass.

There can be no doubt that the Phoenicians were a people of great practical ability, with an intellect quick to devise means to ends, to scheme, contrive, and execute, and with a happy knack of perceiving what was practically valuable in the inventions of other nations, and of appropriating them to their own use, often with improvements upon the original idea.

But they were not possessed of any great genius or originality.

They were, on the whole, adapters rather than inventors.

They owed their idea of alphabetic writing to the Accadians,[332] their weights and measures to Babylon,[333] their shipbuilding probably to Egypt,[334] their early architecture to the same country,[335] their mimetic art to Assyria, to Egypt, and to Greece.