About the Mystery of the Letters the mid-6th century, in which Mar Saba had played an important role. The anonymous author of the treatise declares he was prompted to the study of the secret meanings of the letters by the words of the Apocalypse, "I am the Alpha and Omega", and that he subsequently received a vision about them on Mount Sinai. The author proposes a re-modelled Greek alphabet reduced to 22 letters on the model of the 22 letters of Hebrew (discounting Xi Ξ and Psi Ψ), and with the Hebrew letter names. He then interprets these letters as symbolic figures of 22 works of
History of the alphabet accepted in the mid-seventeenth century. The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the fourteenth century BCE in the town of Ugarit on Syria's northern coast. Tablets found there bear over one thousand cuneiform signs, but these signs are not Babylonian and there are only thirty distinct characters. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order. There are two orders found, one of which is nearly identical to the order used for Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and a second order very similar to that used for Ethiopian. It is not known how