They worked out this alphabetic code, just out of sheer need for speed in their calculations and bookkeeping, and they passed it along to the Greeks. Fascinating story about how the Greeks happened to pick it up. It was not picked up by educated people and gradually transmitted to the hoi polloi. Havelock has a new essay on the alphabet; it’s in the new literary history. He explains that the alphabet got going thanks to the, what do they call these people who do inscriptions?
