only one step remainedae to invent letters. The sign for a house meant at first the word for housea€"per; then it meant the sound per, or r with any vowel in between, as a syllable in any word Then the picture was shortened, and used to represent the sound po, pa pu, pe or pi in any word; and since vowels were never written, this was equivalent to having a character for P. By a like development the sign for a hand (Egyptian dot) came to mean d da etc., finally D: the sign for mouth (ro or ru) came to mean R; the sign for snake (zt) became Z the sign for lake (shy) became Sh The result was an alphabet of twenty-four consonants, which passed with Egyptian and Phoenician trade to quarters of the Mediterranean, and came down, via Greece and Rome, as one of the most precious parts of our oriental heritage 140 Hieroglyphics are as old as the earliest d alphabetic characters appear first in inscriptions left by the Egyptians in the mines of the Sinai peninsula, variously dated at 2500 and 1500 B 141