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SYLLABIC SYSTEMS OF WRITING
161 M. Dunand argues that this pseudo-hieroglyphic script, originated under Egyptian influence, at the end of the First Period of the Bronze age, that is about the twenty-second century B.C. Twenty-five symbols seem to have been directly borrowed from the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, and the shapes of about the same number of signs seem to have been suggested by Egyptian hieroglyphs. The consonantal principle and the selected symbols to represent mono-consonantal words were used by the Egyptians at the beginning of the third millennium B.C., but the Phænicians developed these advantages about one thousand years later, and have thus accomplished a new invention in the "career" of
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Fig. 84-Another spatula inscribed in the pseudo-hieroglyphic syllabary of Byblos
fa, obverse; b, teverse) consonantal representation. Until the end of Bronze I, Byblos had no writing of its own; the pseudo-hieroglyphic script was a contribution of the early Phænician civilization after the ruin of the civilization of the third millennium B.C. From the cultural and economic points of view, Phoenicia was then in a very favourable position to invent a proper script. Finally, according to M. Dunand, the documents extant do us to determine the chronology of the development of this script, but a spatula (Fig. 107, 3), containing a Phænician inscription and some scratching in pseudo-hieroglyphic writing, proves that the latter was still employed at the time when the alphabet was already used.
Decipherment
Professor Edouard Dhorme, the known orientalist and one of the decipherers of the Ugarit alphabet, seems to have succeeded in deciphering
