 According to Herodotus, the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet—"phoinikeia grammata", "Phoenician letters"—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet.Herodotus claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus.He estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years before his time (while the historical adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks was barely 350 years before Herodotus).