1. The devout French monarch,
improved royal
govemment

The correct answer is D. Phoenicians.

Explanation

Phenicia is the name of an ancient region of the Middle East, where the Phoenician-Punic civilization was born, located on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Its territory covered areas of present-day Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, from the mouth of the Orontes River to the north, to Haifa Bay to the south.

The Phoenicians were the inventors of the Phoenician alphabet that grouped a series of ideograms, a set of symbols representing animals and objects. Also, these ideograms were related to a sound according to the name, in the Phoenician language. An important feature of this alphabet is that it only contained consonants, twenty-two in all. Subsequently, the Phoenician alphabet was adopted and modified by the Greeks to represent their language. The Greeks took some letters of the Phoenician alphabet and gave them vowel value, they also changed the pronunciation of some letters and added some symbols to represent non-existent sounds in Phoenician. So, the correct answer is D. Phoenicians.