First in significance among these borrowings was the alphabet. From a simplified form of Egyptian hieroglyphs presumably developed by uneducated workers in the turquoise mines of Sinai, the Phoenicians of Byblus derived a phonological script which they developed into a consonantal alphabet of twenty-two letters, thus effecting the greatest invention ever made by man. This occurred before 1500 B.C., and short Canaanite inscriptions in this alphabet date from only a century or two later, as do tablets from Ugarit written in a cuneiform version of this alphabet. Several non-alphabetic scripts were also in use in Syria during the second millennium. Such abundance of scripts indicates that the age was one of cultural pluralism and cross-fertilization in which Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Syrian ideas were freely exchanged and blended, though little of the relevant literature—written on perishable papyrus—has survived. Phoenician inscriptions died out by the time of Christ, though its Carthaginian form, Punic, was spoken until the Moslem conquest of North Africa. Meanwhile the Greeks had borrowed the alphabet before 750 B.C., inserted characters for vowels and passed it on to the Romans, through whom and the Slavs it reached all the peoples of Europe. The Aramaeans, too, had modified the Phoenician original before bequeathing it to the Arabs, Indians, Armenians, and other alphabet-using peoples of Asia.
Canaanite literature is known to us from two sources: the Hebrew Scriptures—in which lyrics, maxims and legends were embedded—and the tablets excavated at Ugarit since 1929. This material is mostly ritual and religious, representing an important portion of the lost Canaanite literature and exhibiting close parallels with the Book of Job, the Psalms and other Hebrew pieces from the common Semitic stock.
Basic in the Canaanite religion, as indicated by the meagre literary sources and the recent archaeological discoveries, was the worship of the forces of growth and
