tlE
THE
■ \
EX BIBLIOTHECA
CAR. I. TAB ORI S.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORWA. SAN WEGO
lA JOLU. CALIFORNIA
THE STORY OF
THE ALPHABET
BY
EDWARD CLODD
AUTHOR OK
THE STORY OF PRIMITIVE MAN," "PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION,
'•the STOKV of CREATION," ETC, ETC.
'* The i-^vo greatest inz'entions of the human mind
are 'vriting and money — thecomtMon /ttngitage of intel-
ligence, and the common language of self-interest."—
Marquis de Miraheai.-.
WITH NINKTV ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON
GEORGE NEWNES, Limited
SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND
19CX)
THIS LITTLE HISTORY
OF
ABC
IS DEDICATED lO
DOROTHY DAY
BY HER
LOVIXG GRANDFATHER
PREFACE
If this little book does not supply a want, it
fills, however imperfectly, a gap ; for the only
work in the English language on the subject —
Canon Isaac Taylor's "History of the Alphabet"
— is necessarily charged with a mass of techni-
cal detail which is stiff reading even for the
student of graphiology. Moreover, invaluable
and indispensable as is that work, it furnishes
only a meagre account of those primitive stages
of the art of writing, knowledge of which is
essential for tracing the development of that
art, so that its place in the general evolution of
human inventions is made clear. Prominence
is therefore given to this branch of the subject
in the following pages.
In the recent reprint of Canon Taylor's book
no reference occurs to the important materials
collected by Professor Flinders Petrie and Mr.
Arthur J. Evans in Egypt and Crete, the result
of which is to revolutionise the old theory of
the source of the Alphabet whence our own and
others are derived. This opens up a big ques-
tion for experts to settle ; and here it must
suttee to present a statement of the new evi-
dence, and to point out its significance, so that
the reader be not taken into the troubled
atmosphere of controversy. That he may,
further, not be distracted by footnotes, references
to the authorities cited are printed in the text.
E. C.
ROSEMONT. 19 CARLF.TON RoAD,
Tlfnkll Pakk. X.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. INTRODUCTORY ....
II. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE AI.l'HAHET ,
III. MEMORY-AIDS AND I'lCTURK-WRlTINi:
{a) Mnemonic
(/;) IMctorial .
(c) Ideographic
(d) Phonetic .
IV. CHINESE, JAl'ANESK, AND COREAN SCKIl'T:
V. CUNEIFORM WRITING .
VI. EGYPTIAN HIEKOGLYrillCS .
{a) Ilierof^lyphic Writini
{/>) Hieratic Writing
(c) Demotic Writing
VII. THE ROSE IT A STONE .
VIII. EGYPTIAN WRITING IN ITS RELATION T<
OTHER SCRIPTS ....
IX. CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS
X. GREEK PAPYRI
The Diffusion of the " Ph'vnician
Alphabet —
{a) Aramean ....
(/') Sabean ....
(c) Hellenic ....
XI. RUNES AND OGAMS ....
INDEX .
PAGE
9
37
S2
89
113
"5
125
127
12S
134
157
iqS
207
212
213
223
229
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Indian Petition to t'tf Unite J States Congress
Frontispiece
difa^ical Pictograph against Stings .
Magical Detnce against Skin Disease
A /'Original Kock Cart'ings {Australia)
Al'original Koik l^aintings {Australia)
Bushman Paintings ....
Ituihitiiin Paintings . ...
S/>eiinit-n o/ llushmen Rock Sculptures
Engravin!;s found on Rocks in Algeria
Pushman Rain-L hartn
Seinang Rain-CUartn
, Record I'/ Expedition
I'arious Types of the Human p'orm
Quipu,/or Reckoning, «!-•<.
Double Calumet ll'ampum ...
Double Calumet Council Heart i:
Jesuit Missionary Wampum
/''our \at ions' Alliance ll'ampum
. I'cnn U'atnpum ......
13. Imiian i',ra7>e-posts
I'omh-board 0/ Indian Chief ....
Hunter's Crax>€-post
A Cadgers Map of a Begging District
Ojiiiva LoT'e-letter .....
I.oz-e-song
Mnemonic Song of an Ojiinva Medicine-pnan .
II 'til'eno destroying an Enemy ....
Etching on Innuit Drilld>ozv ....
cyihva Hunting Record .....
Hidatsa Pictograph on a Buffalo Shoulder-blcuie
Alaskan Hunting Record .....
Record of Starzung Hunter ....
Alaskan Hunting Life
Indian Expedition ......
Biography of Indian Chief ....
ITar-Si-ng ........
Letter offer ing Treaty of Peace
Census Roll of an Indian Band
Record of Departure {Innuit) ....
vii
Xiii LIST OF ILLU5TF.ATIOX5
FIG. P-^"^^
33. Statue from. Palenque "'
34. Itzcr^atl •''"!'
35. Reo-us of Itzcoa±l ,•.....• ^^
3^. PateTKOsteT Rehvs . . ~-
y;. Ckiiuse PictiiTe) are merely the outcome of
that rude artistic fancy of man which, as has
been seen, has had continuous expression from
prehistoric times.
CHAPTER III
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING
The printed letters or sound-signs which com-
pose our alphabet are about two thousand five
hundred years old. " Roman type " we call
them, and rightly so, since fiom Italy they
came. They vary only in slight degree from
the founts of the famous printers of the fifteenth
century, these being imitations of the beautiful
"minuscule" (so called as being of smaller
size) manuscripts of four hundred years earlier.
Minuscule letters are cursive {i.e. running) forms
of the curved letters about an inch long called
" uncials " (from Latin iincia., "an inch," or from
uncus, "crooked"), which were themselves de-
rived from the Roman letters of the Augustan
age. These Roman capitals, to which those in
modern use among us correspond, " are practic-
ally identical with the letters employed at Rome
in the third century B.C.; such, for instance, as
are seen in the well-known inscriptions on the
tombs of the Scipios, now among the treasures
of the Vatican. These, again, do not differ very
materially from forms used in the earliest existing
specimens of Latin writing, which may probably
be referred to the end of the fifth century B.C.
Thus it appears that our English alphabet is a
38 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
member of that great Latin family of alphabets,
whose geographical extension was originally con-
terminous, or nearly so, with the limits of the
Western Empire, and afterwards with the ancient
obedience to the Roman See." (Canon Isaac
Taylor's History of the Alphabet, vol. i. p. 71.)
The age of our own alphabet being thus
indicated, we may postpone further remark on
its lineal descent, and pass to inquiry into
the primitive forms of which all alphabets are
the abbreviated descendants, and also to
reference to some primitive methods for which
they are substitutes.
A survey of the long period which this
development covers shows four well-marked
stages, although in these, as in aught else
appertaining to man's history, there are no true
lines of division. The making of these, like
the apparent lines of longitude and latitude of
the cartographer, is justified by their con-
venience. These stages are : —
{ii) The Mnemonic, or memory-aiding,
when some tangible object is used as a message,
or for record, between people at a distance,
and also for the purpose of accrediting the
messenger. As will be seen, it borders on the
symbolic ; indeed, it anticipates that stage.
{b) The Pictorial, in which a picture of
the thing is given, whereby at a glance it tells
its own story.
{/) The Ideographic, in which the picture
becomes representative, i.e. is converted into
a symbol.
\d) The Phonetic, in which the picture
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 39
becomes a phonogram, or sound-representing
sign. Tlie phonogram may be — (i) verbal^ i.e.
a sound-sign for a whole word; (2) syllabic.,
i.e. a sound-sign for syllables; or (3) alphabetic^
a sound-sign for each letter.
To recapitulate stages (/>), (; ^=r jf seven strokes note the
^^^if^^ — - # seven war parties whom
■f^ 11 he led ; the three up-
right strokes as many
wounds received in
battle. The horned head
tells of a desperate fight
with a moose.
Fig. 15 is a reduced
copy (Hoffman) of the
grave-board of an Innuit
hunter. The vocation
of the dead man is
shown in the haidarka^
or boat, in which he
is depicted as rowing
with a companion.
The object beneath
represents a rack for drying fish and skins.
Next to this are figures of a fox and a land
otter, and the network drawing at the bottom
is a copy of the hunter's summer dwelling.
These temporary structures denote the abode
-Tomb-board of Indian
Chief
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 55
of a skin-hunter, those used by fishermen being
dome-shaped. Hoffman adds that " this diffe-
rentiation in the shape of roofs of habitations
appUes to their pictorial representation and not
to their actual form." In close connection with
these mortuary boards there is the ornamenta-
tion of door-posts which we find among British
Columbian, Polynesian, and Maori tribes ; also
the carvings on canoes and other personal
effects to mark ownership or to identify the
property with the totem. But to pur-
sue this would take us into the domain
of savage art generally, reference to
which is warranted here only in its
mnemonic uses as keeping alive know-
ledge of events which would other-
wise perish. Obviously, the examples
given above can fulfil only a limited
purpose, because only the initiated
can know their meaning. As Dr. Tylor
remarks, such mode of record " may
be compared to the elliptical forms Fi-. 15.-
of expression current in all societies cSve-post
whose attention is given specially to
some narrow subject of interest, and where,
as all men's minds have the same framework
set up in them, it is not necessary to go into
an elaborate description of the whole state of
things ; but one or two details are enough to
enable the hearer to understand the whole.
Such expressions as ' new white at 48,' ' best
selected at 92 ' ('futures fairly active' is a good
example), though perfectly understood in the
commercial circles where they are current,
+
56 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
are as unintelligible to any one who is not
familiar with the course of events in those
circles, as an Indian record of a war-party would
be to an ordinary Londoner." {Early History
of Manki?td, p. 86.) This applies with even
greater force to the large group of symbolic
mnemonics whose purpose is more restricted,
whether it be as help to the singer in his verses,
to the medicine-man in his incantation, to the
hunter in his quest, or, as among ourselves, to
the tramp on his rounds. The subjoined copy
of a cadger's map (fig. 16), given in Hotten's
Slang Dictionary (1869), is an addition to the
number of survivals which are found in so-called
civilised communities, and has fit place among
the examples of pictorial mnemonics in matters
of I, love; 2, sorcery; 3, the chase; 4, war;
and 5, politics which follow it.
I. Love. — Fig. 17 is a reduced copy of a
love-letter, drawn upon birch bark (a material
used elsewhere, as among the Yukaghirs of
Siberia), which an Ojibwa girl sent to her sweet-
heart at White Earth, Minnesota. She was of
the "Bear" totem, he of the "Mud Puppy"
totem; hence the picture of these animals as
representing the addresser and the addressee.
The two lines from their respective camps meet
and are continued to a point between two lakes,
another trail branching off towards two tents.
Here three girls. Catholic converts, as denoted
by the three crosses, are encamped, the left-hand
tent having an opening from which an arm pro-
trudes with beckoning gesture. The arm is
that of the writer of the letter, who is making
Fig. 1 6. — A Cadger's Map of a Begging District.
Explanation of the Hieroglyphics
X No Good ; too poor, and know too much.
f^ Stop. If you have what they want, they'll buy. They are
prettyyfj/ (knowing).
3- Go THIS Way : better than the other road. Nothing that way.
O Bone (good). Safe for a "cold tatur." Cheese your patter
(don't talk much).
V Cooper'd (spoilt) by too many calling there.
CD Gammy (unfavourable) ; likely to have you taken up. Mind the
dog.
Flummuxed (dangerous) ; sure of a month in quod (prison).
© Religious, but tidy on the whole.
57
58 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
the Indian sign of welcome to her lover. " This
is done by holding the palm of the hand down
and forward, and drawing the extended index
finger towards the place occupied by the speaker,
^^
T f t
a'
Ojibwa Love-letter
thus indicating the path upon the ground to be
followed by the person called."
Fig. 18 is the record of a love-song, i,
represents the lover ; 2, he is singing and
Fig. 18. — Love-song
beating a magic drum ; in 3 he surrounds him-
self with a secret lodge, denoting the effects of
his necromancy ; in 4, he and his mistress are
joined by a single arm to show that they are as
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 59
one ; in 5 she is on an island ; in 6 she sleeps,
and as he sings, his magical power reaches her
heart ; and in 7 the heart itself is shown. To
each of these figures a verse of the song corre-
sponds.
1. It is my painting that makes me a god.
2. Hear the sounds of my voice, of my song ; it is my
voice.
3. I cover myself in sitting down by her.
4. I can make her blush, because I hear all she says
of me.
5. Were she on a distant island I could make her
swim over,
6. Though she were far off, even on the other hemi-
sphere.
7. I speak to your heart.
2. Sorcery. — Fig. 19 is the song of an
Ojibwa medicine-man incised upon birch bark.
These conjurers, who correspond to the Siberian
shamans, affect the usual mystery of the priestly
^
(I
\
A\/
Z ^ t i f> 7 i '} 1^ II 't
Fig. 19. — Mnemonic Song of an Ojibwa Medicine-man
craft all the world over, and affirm, like those
who know better, that their thaumaturgic powers
are the direct gift of the god. Him they name
Manabozho — probably some ancestral deity,
6o THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
since he is the great uncle of the anish'inabeg or
" first people." In i, Manabozho holds his bow
and arrow ; 2, represents the medicine-man's
drum and drumsticks used in chanting and in
initiation ceremonies ; 3, a bar or rest observed
while chanting the incantation ; 4, the medicine-
bag, made of an otter skin, in which is pre-
served the white cowrie shell as the sacred
emblem of the cult ; 5, the medicine-man him-
self, horned to show his superior power ; 6, a
funnel-like object, known as a "^jugglery," used
in legerdemain and other hocus pocus ; 7, a
woman, signifying the admission of her sex to
" the society of the grand medicine " ; 8, a bar or
rest, as at 3 ; 9, the sacred snake-skin medicine
bag, which has magic power ; 10, another
woman ; 11, another otter-skin "bag o' tricks,"
showing that women members are allowed to
use it; 12, a female figure, holding a branch of
some sacred plant used in the exorcism of the
demon of disease. In any reference to savage
therapeutics it cannot be too often insisted upon
that diseases are never ascribed to natural
causes. "The Indians believed that diseases
were caused "by unseen evil beings and by witch-
craft, and every cough, every toothache, every
headache, every fever, every boil, and every
wound, in fact all their ailments, were attributed
to such a cause. Their so-called medical prac-
tice was a horrible system of sorcery, and to such
superstition human life was sacrificed on an
enormous scale. ... In fact, a natural death
in a savage tent is a comparatively rare phe-
nomenon ; but death by sorcery, medicine, and
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 6 1
blood-feud arising from a belief in witchcraft
is exceedingly common." (Professor Powell's
Indian Linguistic Families of America North
of Mexico^ p. 39.)
Fig. 20 records the destruction of an enemy
by an Ojibwa wabeno or bad medicine-man.
The box-like objects represent the four degrees
of the cult society to which the wabeno be-
longed, the number of posts indicating the
series. The figure next to these is that of the
assistant to the wabeno, who is shown with a
waving line extending from his mouth to the
oval-like object intended to represent a lake
Fig. 20. — Wabeno destroying an Enemy
upon an island in which the victim lives. He
is shown prostrate beneath the wabeno with a
spot upon his breast, the small oblong figure
between the two being the sacred drum. ^(See
2 in the foregoing illustration.) The meaning
of the pictograph is that the wabeno was em-
ployed to work black magic on the man. He
took a piece of birch bark and cut upon it the
effigy of the victim, then, after beating the
drum to the chanting of incantations, he pierced
the breast of the effigy, applying red paint to
the puncture. This, under the principle of
" sympathetic magic," was believed to bring
about the death of the victim, whom, through
62 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
his living on the island, the wabeno could not
reach.
White magic, in which the beneficent powers
are at work, is illustrated by the Innuit picto-
graph on an ivory drill-bow (fig. 2 1), on the right
of which are two huts, nearest to which stands
the medicine -man who has been called in to
Fig. 2T. — Etching on Innuit Drill-bow
exorcise the disease from a couple of sufferers.
He is catching hold of the animal by whose help
the disease-demon is expelled, or to whom,
mayhap, as a sort of scapegoat, the disease is
transferred. In the second exorcism, the medi-
cine-man is grasping the patient by the arm,
while he chants the formulae wherewith to cast
out the demon. The figure on the left is
Fig. 22.— Ojibwa Hunting Record
making a gesture of surprise at his relief, while
beyond him are two demons strugghng to
escape beyond the power of the medicine man.
3. T/ie Chase. — Fig. 22 records a hunting
expedition. The two lines represent a wave-
tossed river, on which floats a bark canoe,
guided by the owner. In the bow a piece of
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 63
birch bark shields a fire of pine knots to light
up the course taken by the steersman. By this
means the game, as it comes to the water to
drink, can be seen from the shaded part of the
canoe, in front of which two deer are shown.
Next to these is a circle representing a lake,
from which peep the head and horns of a third
deer. To the right of the lake a doe appears,
and beyond her the two wigwams of the hunter.
The four animals may repre-
sent the quarry secured.
Fig. 23, drawn on a buffalo
shoulder-blade by a Hidatsa
Indian, tells his efforts to track
companions who had gone ^'
buffalo-hunting. The trail of «
the animal and the pursuers is "^"
shown in the dotted lines. Of "
the three heads the lowest is ^' ^^
that of the seeker, who is de- /^
picted shouting after his miss- «,
ing friends; then he is shown Fig..3._HidatsaPic-
advancmg and still shouting, tograph on a Buf-
till his call is returned from f-i° Shouider-biade
the spot where the hunters have camped.
Fig. 24, incised on an ivory drill-bow, is a
pictograph of an Alaskan sea-lion hunt. In i,
the speaker points with his left hand in the direc-
tion to be taken, and, 2, holds a paddle to show
that a voyage is intended. In 3, the right hand
to the side of the head denotes sleep, while
the left hand with one finger elevated means
one night. The circle with two dots in the
middle, 4, signifies an island with huts ; 5 is
64 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
the same as i ; 6 is another island ; 7 is the
same as 3, but with two fingers elevated to
indicate two nights. In 8 the speaker with his
harpoon makes the sign of a sea-lion with his
left hand, which he thrusts outward and down-
ward in a slight curve to represent the animal
swimming ; 9, 10, a sea-lion shot at with bow
1-2345678 9 10 II 12
Fig. 24. — Alaskan Hunting Record
and arrow ; 1 1, two men in a boat, the paddles
pushed downwards ; and 1 2, the speaker's hut.
The native account, as translated, reads thus :
"I there go that island, one sleep there ; then I go
another that island, there two sleeps ; I catch one
sea-lion, chen return mine." (Colonel Mallery,
quo. Hoffman, Traits act ioiis of the Anthro-
pological Society^ Washington, vol. ii. p. 134,
1883.) "Hunters who have been unfortunate,
il- #~t,^^
Fig. 25. — Record of Starving Hunter
and are starving, scratch or draw upon a piece
of wood characters like those in fig. 25, and place
the lower end of the stick in the ground on the
trail where it is most likely to be discovered,"
the stick being inclined towards the hunter's
dwelHng. The horizontal line i, denotes a canoe,
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 65
2, the gesture of the man withboth arms extended,
signifies "nothing," while the uplifting of the
right hand to the mouth, 3, means " food " or
"to eat," and the left hand outstretched points to
4, the hut of the famished man. Here we are
actually within the ideographic stage, and, as
will be shown in due course, handling material
identical in character with that found in Egypt
and other nations of antiquity. But, as already
remarked, and as will be evidenced in abun-
dance throughout these pages, there are no
well-marked divisions between the stages of
development.
A varied interest attaches to fig. 26, which
depicts some general features of Alaskan life on
a piece of walrus tusk. In i, a native is resting
against his house, and on his right stands a
pole surmounted by a bird, apparently a totem-
post. 2. A reindeer. 3. One man shooting
at another with an arrow. 4. An expedition in
a dog-sledge, and, 5, in a boat with sail and
paddle. 6. A dog-sledge, with the sun above ;
perhaps indicating the coming of summer. 7.
A sacred lodge. The four figures at each outer
corner represent young men armed with bows
and arrows to keep off the uninitiated from the
forbidden precincts. The members of the
occult society are dancing round a fire in the
centre of the lodge. 8. A pine tree up which a
porcupine is climbing. 9. Another pine tree,
from which a woodpecker is extracting larvae.
10. A bear. 11, 12. Men driving fish into,
13, the net, above them being a captured whale,
with harpoon and line attached.
E
66
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
4. War. — Schoolcraft, who has been already
drawn upon for an example (page 53), records
the finding of the bark letter
copied in fig. 2 7. It was fastened
to the top of a pole so as to
attract the notice
of other Indians
who might happen
to be passing.
Beginning on the
right of the middle
row we have i,
the officer in com-
mand, sword in
hand ; 2, his secre-
tary, and 3, the
geologist of the
party, indicated
by his hammer.
Then follow 4, 5,
two attaches ; 6,
the interpreter ;
and 7, 8, two
Chippewa guides.
In the top row is
9, 10, a group of
seven soldiers,
armed with mus-
kets. A prairie
hen and tortoise,
II, 12, represent
the animals secured for food.
Fig. 28 gives the biography of Wingemund, a
noted Delaware chief. To the left is i, the tor-
26.— Alaskan Hunting Life
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 67
toise totem of the tribe ; then 2, the chief-totem ;
and 3, the sun,
fc;
mmm
'i^A'j^ I"
65432
beneath which
are ten strokes
representing the
ten expeditions
in which Winge-
mund took part.
On the opposite
side are indi-
cated, 4, 5, 6, 7,
the prisoners of
both sexes taken,
and also the killed, these last being drawn as
^ M 1^
Fig. 27. — Indian Expedition
Fig. 28, — Biography of Indian Chief
headless. In the centre are the several posi-
tions attacked, 8, 9, 10, 11; and the slanting
68
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
Strokes at the bottom denote the number of
Wingemund's followers.
Fig. 29 is a war-song. Wings are given to
the warrior, i, to show that he is swift-footed;
in 2 he stands under the morning star, and in
3 under the centre of heaven, with his war-club
and rattle; in 4, the eagles of carnage are flying
round the sky ; in 5, the warrior lies slain on the
Fig. 29. — War-song
battlefield ; while in 6 he appears as a spirit in the
sky. The words of the song are as follows : —
1. I wish to have the body of the swiftest bird.
2. Every day I look at you ; the half of the day I sing
my song.
3. I throw away my body.
4. The birds take a flight in the air.
5. Full happy am I to be numbered with the slain.
6. The spirits on high repeat my name.
5. Political and Social. — The frontispiece is
a copy of a petition sent by a group of Indian
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 69
tribes to the United States Congress for fishing
rights in certain small lakes near Lake Superior.
The leading clan is represented by Oshcabawis,
whose totem is i, the crane; then follow 2,
Waimitligzhig ; 3, Ogemagee ; and 4, a third, all
of the marten totem ; 5, Little Elk, of the bear
totem ; 6, belongs to the manfish totem ; 7, to
the catfish totem.
From the eye and heart of each of the
animals runs a line connecting them with the
eye and heart of the crane to show that they
are all of one mind, and the eye of the crane
has also a line connecting it with the lakes on
which the tribes want to fish, while another
line runs towards Congress.
Fig. 30 is a copy of a letter found above
St. Anthony's Falls in 1820. "It consisted of
white birch bark, and the figures had been
carefully drawn, i, Denotes the flag of the
Union ; 2, the cantonment then recently estab-
lished at Cold Spring, on the western side
of the cliffs; 4 is the symbol of Colonel
Leavenworth, the commanding officer, under
whose authority a mission of peace had been
sent into the Chippewa country ; 1 1 is the
symbol of Chakope, the leading Sioux chief,
under whose orders the party moved ; 8 is
the second chief, named Wabedatunka, or,
ID, the Black Dog, who has fourteen lodges,
7 is a chief also subordinate to Chakope,
with thirteen lodges, and 9 is a bale of goods
devoted by the Government to the objects of
the peace. The name of 6, whose wigwam is 5,
with thirteen subordinate lodges, was not given."
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
(imm m
The letter was
written to
make known
the fact that
Chakope and
his followers,
accompanied
or supported
by the Ameri-
can officer,
had come to
the spot to
make peace
with the Chip-
pewa hunters.
"The Chip-
pewa chief,
Babesacun-
dabee, who
found the
letter, read off
its meaning
without doubt
or hesitation."
(Schoolcraft,
vol. i. p. 352.)
Fig. 31 re-
presents the
census roll of
an Indian
band at Mille
Lac, in the
territory of
Minnesota,
sent in to the
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 7 1
United States agent by Nagonabe, a Chippewa
■+
t
Hill
I 11
nil II
111
-h
II
111
nil
II I II
1 1
1 1
f
III
II
Mil
I I
I
•
III
Mil
mil
iiiiii
■C)
nil
111
III
^
C)
III
Fig. 31. — Census Roll of an Indian Band
Indian, during the annuity payments in 1849.
72 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
As the Indians were all of the same totem,
Nagonabe "designated each family by a sign
denoting the common name of the chief. Thus
5 denotes a catfish, and the six strokes indicate
that the Catfish's family consisted of six indivi-
duals ; 8 is a beaver skin; 9, a sun; 13, an
eagle; 14, a snake; 22, a buffalo; 34, an axe;
35, the medicine-man, and so on." (Lubbock,
Origin of CivUisation, p. 47.)
Fig. 32 supplies a striking example of the
cumbersomeness of the pictograph as contrasted
with the sound-symbol. It is a copy of a
record which an Innuit placed over the door
of his dwelling to notify to his friends that
he had gone on
T\ % % TT a a f[ J\ persons thus
Fig. 32.— Record of Departure (Innuit) notified ^ are in-
dicated in I, 3,
5, 7 ; 2 is the speaker, who denotes the direc-
tion in which he is leaving by his extended left
hand; 4 is the gesture sign for ''many," and 6
for sleep, the upraising of the left hand showing
that he will be some distance away ; 8, his in-
tended return is denoted by the right hand
being pointed homeward, while the left arm is
bent to denote return.
(r) The Ideographic Stage. — As the characters
pass from the pictorial to the emblematic or
the symbolic, their meaning, obviously, becomes
more obscure, save to the initiated. " They do
not," as Colonel Mallery remarks, " depict, but
suggest objects ; do not speak directly through
the eye to the intelHgence, but presuppose in
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 73
the mind knowledge of an event or fact which
the sign recalls. The symbols of the ark, dove,
olive-branch, and rainbow would be wholly-
meaningless to people unfamiliar with the
Mosaic or some similar cosmology, as would
be the cross and the crescent to those ignorant
of history." And even in pictography, as the
same excellent authority observes, "it is very
difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish
between historical and traditional accounts
obtained from Indians. The winter counts
{i.e. the reckoning of time by winters, and the
applying of names instead of numbers to them,
as, e.g., 'catching-wild-horses winter,' the de-
vice for which was a lasso), while having their
chief value as calendars, contain some material
that is absolute and verifiable tribal history."
The difficulties of interpretation, as the ex-
amples given evidence, are in the larger number
being "merely mnemonic records, and treated in
connection with material objects formerly, and
perhaps still, used mnemonically." (Mallery,
"On the Pictographs of the North American
Indians," Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau
of Ethnology^ 1886.)
The signs of advance from the pictorial to
the ideographic stage w^hich are to be noted
among the Red Indians, are more sharply
marked in the hieroglyphs and phonetic charac-
ters on the stone monuments and manuscripts
found among the relics of the vanished peoples
of Mexico and Yucatan.
A number of fatuous theories about the con-
nection of Central American culture with that
74 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
of the Old World have been broached, from
the time when Lord Kingsborough published
his lavishly-illustrated book to prove that the
ancient Mexicans were the descendants of the
lost Ten Tribes of Israel to the present day,
when Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon brings us his
"proofs" that Yucatan was the primitive home
of Adam, and avers that he has discovered not
only the grave of Abel, but disinterred his heart
therefrom, and found the knife wherewith Cain
slew him ! {Queen Moo and the Egyptian
Sphinx, p. 138.) Now, among the certainties
which modern research has reached is that of
the independent origin and development of
civilisation in the New World. Man himself,
whether or not descended from a single pair,
had his origin in one region, probably the Indo-
Malaysian, since there we find his nearest
congeners, the anthropoid apes, while the
pliocene beds of Java have recently yielded a
remarkable corroboration of the theory in the
fossil bones which bring man near to the
common stem whence the highest animals have
diverged. At a period when the general
temperature of the globe was milder than now,
the ancestors of the existing four leadmg
groups — the Ethiopic, Mongolic, American, and
Caucasic — spread themselves over the several
zones of the habitable world, the American
group migrating from Asia and Europe across
the then existing land-connection between those
continents and the New World, where those
various stages of development which are still
to be witnessed from the Arctic regions to Cape
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 75
Horn were reached. Of these the Mexican
plateau affords interesting and valuable material
in the chipped flint implements evidencing a
Stone Age, and in the marvellous buildings
which vie both in their Cyclopean dimensions
and ornamented features with the palaces,
tombs, and temples of Egypt and Assyria,
testifying to the relatively high culture of the
races that raised them. These peoples, usually
grouped together as the ancient Mexicans, are
known as Mayas and Aztecs. The duration of
the empire or confederation of the Mayas is
unknown, but about two hundred years before
the Spanish conquest of America they appear
to have been invaded and subdued by the
Aztecs, whose rule extended from the Atlantic to
the Pacific in the countries now forming Mexico
and portions of the United States. The
remains of the two races are both imperfect
and entangled, so that any coherent story is
not to be extracted from them. But the evi-
dence points to the Mayas as the intellectually
superior race ; the Aztecs, who still form the
bulk of the population of South Mexico,
borrowing largely from them, especially in the
matter of the gods. " If written language be
a test of intelligence, the Mayas were ahead
not only of the Mexican people, but also of
the Peruvians. The latter are believed to have
made no nearer advance towards writing than
the tying of tally-knots on strings, and the
Mexicans, while they had invented paper, wrote
down their ideas, save in the cases of a few
phonetic signs, as children would, by means of
76
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
pictures; but the IMayas, like the Egyptians,
had proceeded beyond pictures to hieroglyphs,
where symbols, more or less arbitrary, stand
for words or syllables, and the mind prepares
itself to invent an alphabet." (Mercer's Hill
Caves of Yucatan^ p. 73.) Some of the more
remarkable hieroglyphic-bearing monuments
of the Mayas have been found in
the palace of Palenque, the Spanish
name of the old Yucatan capital.
They are on stucco slabs above
figures some of which show curious
correspondence to Egyptian statues,
wearing the pleasant but immobile
expression of the latter, and deco-
rated with a similar headdress, while
in one case (fig. 2i7i)^ ^ cartouche
enclosing an inscription is carved
on the phnth. The concluding
panels of one of the codices form
what may be called the Mexican
Book of the Dead. It enforces the
scheme of duty which precedes by
vividly depicting the trial and judg-
ment of the soul after death, and
detailing the perils of the journey
on the way to Mictlan (Payne, ii. 407).
Time and fanaticism have made sad havoc
with the manuscripts, and no satisfactory key
to their decipherment has been found, only a
few words here and there being interpreted.
They were executed in bright and varied colours,
with a feather pencil, on prepared skins, paper,
or rolls of cotton or aloe-fibre cloch, and the
Fig. 33.— Statue
from Palenque
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 77
pictographic system thus created was applied
to the purposes of ordinary hfe, and served as
a species of writing. Matters of only passing
importance were recorded on fibrous paper
made from the leaves of the maguey plant ;
" records intended to be permanently kept were
painted on the prepared skins of animals, those
of the deer and bear being more commonly
used. These paintings or ' pinturos ' are
usually executed on both sides of the skin,
which was oblong in shape and often of great
length, having the ends protected by boards."
(Payne's History of the New World called
Ajnerica, vol. ii. p. 404.) These boards are
called analtees, a word which may be translated
annals. The earlier hieroglyphic characters
were executed by priests, who were required to
be old men, widowers, and under vows of chastity
and seclusion. Such writing was known only to
the initiated.
Tradition says that the Aztecs destroyed
many of the Maya picture records because
they recalled the grandeur of the conquered
people. But the Spaniards in their turn de-
stroyed much more. Zumarraga, Bishop of
Mexico, and Landa, Bishop of Yucatan, made
such bonfires of carvings, statues, paintings on
wood, and of priceless picture and hieroglyph
writings on native paper and deerskin, that only
about half-a-dozen fragments of the Yucatan
books have ever beenfoundsince. Bishop Landa,
probably from knowledge obtained from Maya
priests, attempted the framing of a key of inter-
pretation, his aim being the translation of certain
78 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
religious and devotional writings for the use of
converts. In this he indicates a certain number
of alphabetic characters, but the key did not
v;ork, and Dr. Isaac Taylor draws the con-
clusion that "the systems of picture-writing
which were invented and developed by the
tribes of Central America are so obscure, and so
little is really known about their history, that they
must be regarded rather as literary curiosities
than as affording suitable materials for enabling
us to arrive at any general conclusions as to the
nature of the early stages of the development of
the graphic art." {Hist. Alph.^ i. 24.) Not-
withstanding this somewhat sweeping verdict,
the Maya-Aztec scripts have value, if only for
purposes of comparison. There is preserved in
the museum at Mexico a whole series of picto-
graphs exhibiting incidents as varied as the
migrations of tribes, the annals of the people,
sacrifices to the gods, and the education of
children, the tasks set them, the punishments
inflicted on them, and the food given them. To
the hieroglyph there succeeds the gradually con-
ventionalised sign, of which examples from Red
Indian scripts have been given : — the arrow,
to denote an enemy ; several arrows, several
enemies ; the direction of the arrow's point, the
direction taken by the enemy ; a piece of maize
cake protruding from the mouth, to denote
eating ; the symbol for water between the lips,
to signify drinking ; horizontal lines, with arrow-
headed characters on them, to denote the hoed
or cultivated ground, some of these ideographs
being coloured to correspond with the thing sug-
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 79
gested; and, as an example of the more abstruse,
the extended arms, probably to denote negation,
— all marking the advance to phonetic syllabic
writing. The names of persons and places are
sometimes indicated by symbolic figures; e.g.
Chapultepec, or "grasshopper hill," is repre-
sented by a hill and a grasshopper ; Tzompanco,
"the place of skulls," by a skull on a bar between
two posts, as enemies' skulls used to be set up ;
and Macuilxochitl, the "five flowers," by five
dots and a flower. Sometimes we find the species
of pun known as the rebus adopted. A picture
is made to stand for the sound of the word, as
e.g. among ourselves in guessing games, when a
whisk broom and a key stand for " whiskey," or
in the series of pictures of an eye, a saw, a boy,
a swallow, a goose, and a berry, which stand for
the sentence, " I saw a boy swallow a goose-
berry." In Abbot Islip's Chapel in Westminster
Abbey his name is rebused as an eye and the
slip of a tree with the hand apparently of a
slipping man hanging to it. In Bishop Oldham's
chantry in Exeter Cathedral his name is re-
presented by an owl (Owle-dom, the old spelling
of the name) ; and in St. Saviour's Church the
name of Prior Burton is sculptured as a cask
with a thistle on it, " burr-tun.'^
{d) The Phonetic Stage. — The ancient Mexi-
can script supplies examples of the change from
the pictographic to the phonetic stage. The
name of one of the kings was Itzcoatl, or
"Knife-Snake.'' In the manuscript known as
the Le TeUier Codex this king's name (fig. 34)
is represented by a serpent {coatt) with stone
So THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
knives (//s/V) upon its back. This is mere picture-
writing, but in the Vergara Codex we find the
rebus form (fig. 35). "The first syllable, /Vs, is
represented by a weapon armed with blades
of obsidian, I'fz (f/i), but the rest of the word,
coa//, though it means snake, is written, not by
a picture of a snake, but by an earthen
pot, CO (;;////), and above it the sign of
water, a (//). Here we have real pho-
netic writing, for the name is not to be
read, according to sense, ' knife-kettle-
water,' but only according to the sound
of the Aztec words, Itz-co-atl." Dr.
Tyloradds that there is no sufficient rea-
Fig. 34.— son to make us doubt that this purely
itzcoati phonetic writing was of native Mexi-
can origin, and that after the Spanish Conquest
it was turned to account in a new and curious
way. The Spanish missionaries, when embar-
rassed by the difficulty of getting the converts to
remember their A7'e Marias and Paternosters^
seeing that the words were, of course, mere
nonsense to them, were helped out
by the Indians themselves, who sub-
stituted Aztec words as near in sound
as might be to the Latin, and wrote
down the pictured equivalents for
these words, which enabled them to
remember the required formulas. Torquemada
and Las Casas have recorded two instances of
this device. Pater 7ioster was written by a flag
(pantli) and a prickly pear {7wchtli), while the
sign of water, a {tl) combined with that of
aloe, me {tl), made a compound word, a7?ietl.
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 8 1
which would mean "water-aloe," but in sound
made a very tolerable substitute for Amen. M.
Aubin found the beginning of a Pater?iosfer of
this kind in the metropolitan library of Mexico
(fig. 36), made with a flag, pan {tit), a stone, te {tl),
a prickly pear, noch {tli), and again a stone, te {tl),
which would read Pa-te-noch-te, or perhaps
Pa-tetl-noch-tetl. After the conquest, when the
Spaniards were hard at work introducing their
own religion and civilisation among the con-
quered Mexicans, they found it convenient to
allow the old picture-writing still to be used,
even in legal documents. It disappeared in
time, of course, being superseded in the long
run by the alphabet, and it is to this transition
period that we owe many, perhaps most, of the
picture documents still -_ -v^^^ ^ r-jp^
preserved. " One of the r ^ ^ M^
J- . . pa- te noch- t«
picture-writings m the Fig. 36. -Paternoster
museum at Mexico is ^^^"5
very probably the same that was sent up to
Vera Cruz, to Montezuma, with figures of newly-
arrived white men, their ships and horses, and
their cannon with fire and smoke issuing from
their mouths." (Tylor, Anahziac, p. 232.)
In the general history of the development of
writing, the Mexican script therefore supplies us
only with an example of approximation to the
phonetic system, its advance to the final alpha-
betic stage being probably arrested by the sub-
jugation of the Mayas to an intellectually
inferior conqueror, who, borrowing much, and
contributing nothing of advantage, himself
yielded to the superior force of Spain.
F
CHAPTER IV
THE CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS
China, whose inertia is being aroused by
foreign "pin-pricks," is the land of arrested
developments, and consequently its writing
has remained for probably two thousand years
at a rudimentary stage, furnishing an interesting
object-lesson on the early processes of advance,
after the disuse of knotted cords (see p. 43),
from the Ku-wchi, or "ancient pictures," to the
Ling-shiiig^ or "pictures and sounds." The
language has never got beyond the monosyllabic
stage ; it has no terminations to denote number,
case, tense, mood, or person, the same word
without change of form being used as a noun,
verb, or other "part of speech," so that a sen-
tence can be construed only by the place of the
several words composing it. As Dr. Marshman
tersely puts it, " the whole of Chinese grammar
depends upon position.'' For example, while
the root-meaning of ia is "being great," it may,
as a noun, mean " greatness " ; as an adjective,
" great " ; as a verb, " to be great," or " to make
great"; and as an adverb, "greatly." And,
moreover, not only position, but also tone and
CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS 83
gesture, contribute to the interpretation of the
spoken language.
The characters fall into six wen or classes : —
\^ pictorial^ giving a picture of the thing itself;
2, indicative, i.e. designed by their form and
the relation of their parts to suggest the idea in
the mind of their inventor; 3, cojnposite, i.e.
made up of two characters, the meanings of
which blend in the meanings of the compounds;
4, inverted, or, as the term implies, topsy-turvy;
5, borrozved, i.e. having another meaning attached
to them ; 6, phonetic, i.e. one part indicating the
Sun Moon Mountain Tree Songf fan ear and Light
a bird)
Fig. 37. — Chinese Picture-writing and Later Uncial
sense and another part the sound. In Chinese
phrase the ideogram is the "mother of mean-
ing" and the phonogram the "mother of sound."
The materials used largely determine the form
which writing takes, and in the modern or cur-
sive characters which are shown underneath the
primitive forms we see the result of use of the
rabbit's - hair pencil of the Chinese scribe.
Respecting the first class, it suffices to say little,
because it explains itself (fig. 37). The sun was
drawn as a circle, the moon as a crescent, a
mountain was indicated by three peaks, rain
by drops under an arch, and so forth. But,
84 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
as has been sufficiently shown, such devices
carry us a very Httle way ; there is no Hterature
possible under a mere graphic system. ' The
third, or composite class, is the most interest-
ing as supplying the key to the common idea
of the character represented. Sometimes the
characters indicate a dry humour. A "wife"
is denoted by the signs for "female" and
" broom," a sort of metonymy for a woman's
household work; for a male child the signs
"field" and "strength" are used, because he
will till the soil. The Chinese, it will be
remembered, are a purely agricultural people,
and the compound for "profit" is "grain" and
"a knife." The characters for "mountain"
and /'man" signify "hermit"; an "eye" and
"water" mean "tears"; and the verb " to listen"
is indicated by an ear between two doors. The
signs for the noonday sun are the " sun "
and "to reign"; "light" as an abstract quality
is represented by figures of the sun and
moon placed side by side; a "man" and
"two" stand for mankind; a couple of women
stand for "strife," three for "intrigue," while
a "woman under two trees" means "desire"
or "covetousness." But the inadequacy of
these and the other symbols to supply charac-
ters for the demands of a language in which
the same sound has to stand for a multitude
of ideas gave rise to the phonetic group, whose
development from picture-writing more or less
ideographic took place many centuries B.C.
The primary symbols or combinations of vowels
and consonants number about four hundred
CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS 85
and fifty. The variations in tone in pronounc-
ing these sounds increase the total of mono-
syllabic words to be understood by the ear to
something over twelve hundred. But the
Chinese dictionaries contain above forty thou-
sand words, and it is the symbols for each of
these which are provided by the phonetic
symbols. These were compound signs, the
first character, as shown above, being a phono-
gram or sound-word, and the second character
a determinative, i.e. ideogram or sense-word.
They are, as Professor Whitney says, "rather
an auxiliary language than a reduction of speech
to writing." The sign for "man" has nearly
six hundred combinations, all denoting some-
thing relating to man ; that for " tree " has
about nine hundred, to indicate various kinds
of trees and wood, things made of wood, and
so forth ; while, to borrow a concrete example,
/(?, which means "white," has, with a "tree"
prefixed, the meaning of " cypress " ; with the
sign for "man" it means "elder brother";
with the sign for " manes " it means the vital
principle that survives death; and so forth.
Choiv is the Chinese word for "ship," so a
picture of a ship stands for the sound chow.
But the word chow means several other things,
and the determinative or "key" sign indicates
these. " Thus the ship joined with the sign of
water stands for chow^ ' ripple ' ; with that of
speech for chozv, ' loquacity ' ; with that of fire
for chow^ 'flickering of flame,' and so on for
'waggon-pole,' 'fluff,' and several other things
which have little in common but the name of
86 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET .
choiu^' (Tylor, p. 102). Although, theoretically,
the Chinaman has to make an enormous num-
ber of characters before he can write his own
language, so that, at the age of twenty-five, a
diligent student has barely acquired the same
amount of facility in reading and writirtg which
is usually attained by an English child — using
the twenty-six characters of his alphabet — at
the age of ten ; practically some four or five
thousand characters suffice for average needs,
and the convenience of "a system enabling
those who speak mutually uninteUigible idioms
to converse together, using the pencil instead
of the tongue," caused the abandonment of an
attempt to make nearer approach to an alpha-
betic system which was promoted by the Chinese
Government some centuries ago.
In contrast to this, the Japanese, with that
pliability which has helped to put them in the
van of Oriental peoples, selected, as a result
of contact with Buddhism, which came to them
by way of China, certain signs from the wil-
derness of Chinese characters, and constituted
these as their alphabet or irofa so called, on the
acrologic principle (p. 104), from the names of
its first signs, like our alphabet from alpha^ beta.
Their language being polysyllabic, involved the
result that whatever signs were used must be
syllabic, and hence the adoption of a syllabary
was easy. But, of course, like all syllabaries,
this has the defect of necessitating the use of
that larger number of signs with which the
alphabet dispenses. The origin of the Japanese
syllabaries, of which there are two, dates from
CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS 87
the end of the ninth century of our Lord. One,
the Hirakana, derived from a cursive form of
Chinese called the tsati ox '' grass " character,
contains about three hundred syllabic sound-
signs ; the other, known as the Katakana, is
derived from the kyai or "model" type of
the Chinese character, and is the simpler of
the two in having only a single character for
■each of the forty-seven syllabic sounds in the
Japanese language. But neither demands de-
tailed treatment here, since with the intrusion
of the Roman alphabet among Western imports
into Japan its substitution for the cumbrous
syllabaries is probably only a matter of brief
time, and the Japanese script may then take
its place with the Maya and the Aztec as a
graphic curiosity.
Chinese is the official script of Corea, but
the lower classes use a phonetic alphabet which,
in the judgment of some authorities^ is derived
from a cursive form of the Nagari script of
India, having, so it is thought, been introduced
by Buddhist teachers. Both past and present
times afford striking examples of the influence
of religion in the diffusion of alphabets, mis-
sionaries obviously making use of their own
alphabet in the translation of their sacred books
into the language of their converts. What-
ever connection there may have been between
Corean and Indian scripts is not, however,
traceable, owing to the changes in the former.
But in truth we know little about the matter,
and there is something to be said in support of
an old tradition that King Se-jo, who reigned
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
five hundred years ago, commanded his chief
grammarian, Song Sammun, to devise an alpha-
bet that should supersede the cumbersome
Chinese ; whereupon that
scholar took the Tibetan
characters as foundation,
but as those were only con-
sonantal, he turned to the
ancient Chinese and trans-
forxTied six of its simplest
radicals into the Corean
vowels, naming the vowels
and consonants "mother"
and "child" respectively.
The letters were " bunched
together" so as to look
like the Chinese charac-
ters (fig. 38), the purpose
being " to facilitate the
transliteration of the
Chinese text in a parallel
column." There is a curi-
ous tradition, reminding us
of the Chinese legend of the origin of writing,
that the Corean characters were suggested by
the straight and oblique lattice-work of the
native doors.
^W<
Fig. 38. — Chinese and
Tibetan Triglot
CHAPTER V
CUNEIFORM WRITING
Thus far curiosity alone gives the stimulus to
acquaintance with ancient scripts — a feeling of
aloofness attending all that we learn of Chinese,
]\raya, and other systems having no historical
connection (for the derivation of Chinese from
pre-Babylonian writing is not proved) with those
from which our alphabet is probably derived.
With the story of these the real interest begins,
because within some of them lie the sources of
the alphabets of the civihsed world, while all
of them have borne a share in the preservation
of intellectual and spiritual treasures, the loss
of which would have arrested the progress of
the vigorous sections of mankind.
Dealing first with those of Mesopotamia, a
romance, not lacking excitement, gathers round
the wedge-shaped or cuneiform characters (Lat.
cujieus, " a wedge ') inscribed on clay tablets and
cylinders, and on the great monuments of Assyria,
Babylon, and other Oriental empires of past re-
nown. The very existence of these relics was
forgotten for some sixteen hundred years, and
when they were unearthed from the rubbish-
90 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
heaps of centuries, no one dreamed that any
serious meaning was to be attached to the fan-
tastic angular-shaped characters which covered
bricks and tablets. In 1621, Pietro della Valle,
a Spanish traveller, visited the famous ruins of
Persepolis, and he appears to have been the
first to suspect that the arrow-headed signs
were inscriptions, although he was unable to
decipher them. He, however, made the shrewd
observation that as the thick end of the sup-
posed letters was never at the right but at the
left of the oblique characters, the signs must
have been written from left to right.
" Built on a great platform, artificially con-
structed for the purpose, which commands a
wide plain, and has a lofty mountain shaped
like an amphitheatre at its rear, the stranger
ascends the spot by a magnificent staircase, or
pair of staircases, which separate in opposite
directions to meet at the summit. Here are
the gigantic remains of several palaces, great
porticos with winged bulls and reliefs represent-
ing gods and princes. In the live rock of the
mountains at the rear tombs have been hewn,
evidently to receive the occupants of the palaces,
and all the rocks and walls are covered with
the cuneiform or arrow-headed inscriptions,
consisting of very simple elements, which are
nothing but thin wedges and angles T T > ^ \
but with these elements combined in wonderful
variety. . . But no record of the language or its
import had survived, and the ignorant inhabi-
tants of the neighbourhood looked upon the
CUNEIFORM WRITING 9 1
texts with greater awe than they did the winged
monsters that loomed over the plain. They
were to them symbols of magic import, which,
if duly pronounced, would unlock the hidden
treasures guarded by the lions and the bulls."
(Mahaffy's Prolegoinejia to Ancient History^
p. i68.)
The savants of the seventeenth century were
not " wiser in their generation " than the rude
nomads who pitched their tents under the
shadow of the stone monsters. Many years
after Delia Valle's visit the Oriental scholar,
Hyde, in a book on the Ancient Persian Re-
ligion, soberly suggested that the signs were
designed by some fantastic architect to show
into how many combinations the same kind of
stroke would enter. It is a wonder that he did
not, with equal sobriety, suggest that they were
related to the well-known Norman "hatchet-
work." And so the guessing went on. One
antiquary contended that they were talismanic
signs ; another that they were mystic formulce
of the priests, or astrological symbols of the
old Chaldean star-worshippers ; another saw in
them a species of revealed digital language
wherewith the Creator talked to Adam, whence
the primitive speech of mankind was derived ;
while others conjectured them to be Chinese,
or Samaritan, or Runic, or Ogam characters.
Most fantastic of all, one ingenious theorist
saw in them the action of numberless genera-
tions of worms !
But by the middle of the eighteenth century
a sane school of investigators had found its
92 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
leader. A great traveller, Carsten Niebuhr, father
of the famous historian of early Rome, was the
first to divine the true character of the inscrip-
tions. He agreed with Delia Valle that they were
written from left to right, and he saw that they
were made up of three different sets of charac-
ters, each meaning the same thing. But beyond
showing, in his careful transcript published in
1764, that one of the three scripts was simpler
in character than the others — all, as he assumed,
being alphabetic varieties of one language — he
could not go. The meaning still remained a
mystery. Thirty years later, Miinter, a Danish
philologist, correctly guessed that the diagonal
bar A , which occurred frequently, was a sign
for the separation of words, and, next, he dis-
covered the vowel signs, which, as distinct
characters, are absent from the Hebrew and
other Semitic languages. This was a great step
towards final decipherment. Herodotus (i. 125,
&c.) speaks of the Achsemenid dynasty of
Persian kings who were the lords of Asia in the
sixth and fifth centuries B.C. The ruins of
Persepolis are identified as the remains of their
palaces. Of this royal house the famous Darius
was a member, and Herodotus tells how that
monarch, "having gazed upon the Bosphorus,
set up two pillars by it of white stone with
characters cut upon them, on the one Assyrian
and on the other Hellenic, being the names of
all the nations which he was leading with him "
(iv. 87). The engraving of the same inscription
in two or more different languages (of course
CUNEIFORM WRITING
93
necessitated by making their decrees known to
the various peoples whom they ruled) was thus
shown to be a custom of the Persian kings.
Put upon the quest, a French scholar, M. de
Sacy, born at Paris in 1758, copied some in-
scriptions of the Sassanid dynasty, which reigned
in Persia A.D. 226-651. These were written in
a known alphabet which is a mixture of Persian
and Aramaic, called Pehlevi, and were shown by
De Sacy to run in the following form : — " I, (M
or W,) king of kings, son of (X,) king of kings,
did thus and thus." Then, grouping together
the several facts, came Dr. Georg Friedrich
Grotefend, to formulate the theory that the
Persepolitan inscriptions were written in three
languages, and not three alphabets of one lan-
guage, as Carsten Niebuhr had surmised. The
recurrence of certain groups of characters led
him to the inference that " the inscriptions were
a fixed formula, only differing in the proper
names. If these inscriptions began, like those
read by De Sacy, w^ith the formula, X, the king
of kings, son of jD, the Jzing of kings ^ then it was
clear that D was X's father ; and, further, that
D's father was not a king, because his name
was not followed by that title, D being there-
fore the founder of a royal race. Now, Hystas-
pes, father of Darius, was not king, but satrap
under Cambyses; and, joining his knowledge
of history to his skill in philology, Grotefend
found the key to the royal name. He lived
for thirty years after this discovery, but added
nothing to his triumph save '^a fortunate guess
94 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
of the name Nebuchadnezzar in one of the
Assyrian inscriptions." Other decipherments
followed; but it was reserved for the genius
and industry of our countryman, the late Sir
Henry Rawlinson, to discover the key whereby
the ancient languages of Persia, Babylon, and
Assyria can be read, and thus "a chapter of the
world's history that had been well-nigh wholly
lost made known to mankind." That eminent
scholar in no wise exaggerated the importance
of his work in claiming that its value in the
interpretation of cuneiform writing is almost
equal to that of the discovery of the Rosetta
Stone in the interpretation of the hieroglyphic
texts of Egypt {Arch(Eologia, xxxiv. p. 75).
The story of Rawlinson's achievement is
warrant of the claim. About sixty years ago,
being then a lieutenant, he was sent to Persia
to drill the army of the Shah. His interest in
Oriental history and antiquities was already
keen, and he was glad to find himself in regions
rich in materials the obscurity of whose mean-
ing quickened inquiry. Among these was a tri-
lingual inscription, dating from the early part of
the sixth century B.C., cut on the face of a bare
precipitous rock at Behistun, about twenty miles
from Kirmanshah, a district abounding in monu-
ments of the past (fig. 39). At the risk of life
and limb he climbed the face of the steep cliff
to make copies of such portions of the inscrip-
tions as were accessible with the means at his
command, and after a series of efforts, continued
at intervals through several years, he finally
CUNEIFORM WRITING
95
secured a complete transcript of so much of the
writing as time had left uninjured. The inscrip-
tion is in three languages — Babylonian, Mede
or Scythian, and Persian — arranged in parallel
Fig. 39. — Rock Inscription at Eehistun
columns containing above one thousand lines.
It commemorates " the life and acts of Darius
Hystaspes, his conquests, and the nations under
his sway." Bas-reliefs portray that monarch,
bow in hand, sitting with his feet on the pros-
96 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
trate usurper, Gaumates, while a train of nine
rebel princes, whose names are inscribed above
their effigies, stand before the " king of kings,"
chained together by the neck. Two of the
monarch's soldiers are in the rear. Over
Gaumates is written : " This is Gaumates, the
Magian ; he lied ; he said, I am Smerdis, son of
Cyrus." The same formula occurs over the heads
of each of the nine captives. " This is (M) ; he
lied ; he said he was king of (N)." The inscrip-
tion begins with a solemn invocation to
Ormuzd, the old Persian god of light and
purity, and passes on to detail the claim of
Darius to the throne of the Achaemenids and
the possessions of the Persian crown. It tells
of the defeat of Smerdis, and of the revolt of
Susiana, a province lying between Persia and
Babylonia. " I sent thither an army, and the
rebel Atrina was brought in chains before me ;
I slew him." The same story is narrated con-
cerning other rebellious subjects. Of one Phra-
ortes, it is told that his nose, ears, and tongue
were cut off, and that he was " crucified at
Ecbatana, together with his accomplices." Then
the inscription proceeds :
" King Darius saith : These countries rebelled against
my power. By lies they were separated from me. The
men thou seest here deceived my people. My army took
them, according to my orders. King Darius saith : Oh,
thou that shalt be king hereafter, see that thou art not
guiUy of deceit. Him that is wicked, judge as he should
be judged, and if thou reignest thus thy kingdom will be
great. King Darius saith : What I did, I did ever by the
grace of Ormuzd. Thou that readest upon this stone my
deeds, think not that thou hast been deceived, neither be
CUNEIFORM WRITING 97
thou slow to believe them. King Darius saith : Ormuzd be
my witness that I have not spoken these things with
lying lips." (Cf. Transactio7is of Royal Asiatic Society,
1844-46, 1851 ; also Life of Sir Henry Rawlinson^
pp. 146, 153, 326.)
As Professor Mahaffy points out, the exact
correspondence of this record, " especially in
the many proper names it contains, with the
names of persons and provinces described by
Herodotus, is a convincing proof of the accu-
racy of the deciphering. It will give some
notion of the style of the documents that have
been preserved. It will also prove the accuracy
of the accounts given by Herodotus and Xeno-
phon of the character of the ancient Persians,
in whom an honest love of truth and hatred of
lies was the prominent feature — a feature which
we justly honour more than any other in a
nation, but in which most Oriental nations, and
indeed the Greeks also, were wofully deficient."
{Prokg07?iejia, p. 186.)
Sir Henry Rawlinson's decipherment of the
great inscription of Behistun did perhaps more
than aught else to open the long-closed door
to the secret of Mesopotamian culture. The
Persian inscription is in a language which is
the mother-tongue of modern Persian, and its
meaning being discovered, the interpretation of
the Medic or Scythic, and of the Babylonian, the
oldest of the three, followed, while the several
characters supplied a valuable object-lesson in
the stages of the development of writing from
the ideographic through the syllabic, and thence
of approach to the alphabetic.
98 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
Cuneiform writing appears to have been
originally inscribed upon a vegetable substance
called likhusi, but the abundant clay of the
alluvial country afforded material whose con-
venience and permanence brought it into
general use. Upon this the characters were
impressed by a reed or square-shaped stylus,
the clay-books being afterwards baked or sun-
dried. For inscriptions on stone or metal a
chisel was used. The writing of the Assyrian
scribes is often exceedingly minute, the tablets
containing a mass of matter in a tiny space.
The work was trying enough to sometimes re-
quire the use of a magnifying-glass, and among
Sir Austin Layard's discoveries at Nineveh was
that of a lathe-turned crystal lens which was
probably used for the purpose. Obviously the
substances chosen account for the angular form
of the characters ; as the dyer's hand is " sub-
dued to what it works in," so the nature of the
material in which the sculptor seeks to express
his conceptions largely determines for him the
limits of that expression. Phidias himself could
not have produced his Pallas Athene from the
stubborn granite of Syene ; and, as the outcome
of the Egyptian temperament, the sphinxes of
the Nile valley might have worn a less relent-
less look had they been fashioned of the marble
of Pentelicus. Much as the abrupt cuneiform
character tends, however, to obscure the traces
of its derivation, there are sufficing proofs that
it is of pictographic origin, although no ex-
amples of picture-writing in Mesopotamia corre-
sponding in primitiveness to those already given
CUNEIFORM WRITING 99
from barbaric sources have been discovered.
In the Hnear Babylonian, as it is called, the
hieroglyph for " sun " is a diamond-shaped figure
^ which later on became ^^ , and in the
latest cuneiform, -^T. Evidently the earliest
sign was a circle, which could not be easily
traced on the stone or clay, and hence appears
as the angular character shown above. The
annexed table, which is a copy of one supplied
by Mr. Pinches to Professor Keane, and pub-
lished in his admirable monograph, Man Fast
and Present^ gives a set of typical examples of
the derivation of cuneiform characters from the
earliest known pictographs.
As an illustration bearing upon the specimens
set forth in the table we have the ideogram
of Nineveh ^^£
=0
^
"ox."
^
^
ct)
fl
"to go,"
"to stand."
B
m
1
—
"hand."
^
E^Jfe..
t^S>
1
"man."
«
^>
-^a>
"dagger."
8.<
^1<
*^*^ ^
from the hieratic, and the Fig. 45.— Hferogivphic,
hieratic from the hieroglyphic. JfJIit'S; M?r°"
{a) Pictogram, ideogram,
and phonogram — in other words, signs repre-
sentative of word, idea, and sound — make up
the seventeen hundred hieroglyphs which, in the
older signs, preserve the traces of their origin
Il6 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
in rude picture-writing. They were chiselled
on stone of various kinds, cut or painted on
wood or plaster, and written on papyrus or
skin ; the characters being arranged in vertical
columns.
With the quickened zeal of modern exca-
vators discoveries come apace, so that before
these words are printed, some additional find,
throwing all others into the shade, may come
to light. Such, for example, would be the
production of epigraphic evidence as to the
sojourn and oppression of the Israelites in
Egypt, and their escape from that "house of
bondage." For a long time the earliest known
example of hieroglyphic writing which the
Gizeh and Ashmodean Museums could show
(each institution possessing fragments of the
relic) was a mutilated stele or monumental
tablet to the memory of Shera, a priest or
grandson of Sent, the fifth king of the Second
Dynasty, which, adopting Professor Flinders
Petrie's chronology, flourished about four thou-
sand five hundred years B.C. In this record
three alphabetic characters are employed to
spell that monarch's name. But in November
1897, Dr. Borchardt reported the important
discovery that the royal tomb found by M.
de Morgan in the spring of that year at
Nagada, situate opposite Coptos, a little north
of Thebes, is that of Menes, the founder of the
First Dynasty, whose date Professor Flinders
Petrie fixes at 4777 B.C., "with a possible error
of a century." Calcined remains of the body are
now in the Gizeh Museum, and, among other
EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS II7
objects, the broken fragments of an ivory plaque
which, when joined, showed the ka name of
Aha (the ka being the "double" or "other
self" of the deceased which abode with the
mummy), and, attached thereto, the name
MN = Menes, borne by the Pharaoh during his
lifetime. Assuming that Dr. Borchardt's inter-
pretation is accepted by Egyptologists, it proves
that the hieroglyphic system of writing was then
already fully developed. It may be remarked,
incidentally, that among the remains of the pre-
dynastic race discovered by Professor Flinders
Petrie in 1895, in the district north of Thebes,
no hieroglyphs or traces of other writing were
found. There was evidence of knowledge of
metals, but not of the potter's wheel. It
therefore seems probable that writing came in
with the First Dynasty, which, according to
M. de Morgan, was descended from Chaldean
Semites.
But more interesting, for the light thrown
on early Egyptian thought, than inscriptions
on stele or plaque are the copies of portions of
the sacred literature entitled "Chapters of the
Coming Forth by Day," and also the "Chapters
of Making Strong the Beatified Spirit," but
commonly known as the Book of the Dead.
This venerable embodiment of human con-
ceptions about an after life, and of human
hope and consolation this side the grave, con-
tains the hymns, prayers, and magic formulae
against all opposing foes and evil spirits, to be
recited by the dead Osiris (the soul was con-
ceived to have such affinity with the god Osiris
Il8 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
as to be called by his name) in his journey to
Amenti, the underworld that led to the Fields
of the Blessed. It lies outside both our scope
and space to give an account of the contents of
the several chapters, and, fortunately, the entire
text, translated by Dr. Wallis Budge, with
admirable facsimiles of illustrations, is within
the reach of a moderate purse. But one curious
and prominent feature should have reference,
because it shows the persistence of barbaric
ideas about names as integral parts of things.
(On this subject, see the author's Tom Tit Tot ;
an Essay on Savage Philosophy ifi Folk- Tale,
1898.) The Osiris has not only to be able to
recite the names and titles of the gods, but of
every part of the boat, " from truck to keel," as
the nautical phrase goes, in which he desires to
cross the great river flowing to Amenti. And
then, before he can enter the Hall of the Two
Truths — that is, of Truth and Justice, where the
god Osiris and the forty-two judges of the dead
are seated — the jackal-headed Anubis requires
him to tell the names of every part of the doors,
posts, and woodwork generally. These correctly
given, the soul declares its innocence in language
whose moral tone has never been surpassed,
while it throws a light on the virtues and vices
of old Egyptian society which makes clear how
poor a guide to the past are its monuments com-
pared with its literature.
The age of the composition of this remarkable
book is unknown. But so old is it that the
earliest copies we possess show that when they
were made, some six thousand years ago, the
EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS II9
exact meaning of parts of the text had become
obscure to the transcribers. Fragments of it
have been found in those ancient tombs, the
Pyramids ; chapters or long extracts were writ-
ten on stone and wooden coffins ; but after the
expulsion of the Hyksos, or Shepherd Dynasty,
by the kings of Thebes, about 15S0 e.g., papy-
rus came more into use for the purpose.
One of the most superbly-illustrated examples
is that known as the Papyrus of A?ii^ belonging
to what is called the Theban recension of the
text, which was much used from the Eighteenth
to the Twentieth Dynasty (1587-1060 B.C.).
It will suffice, as evidence of the magical quali-
ties attributed to the written word, to quote
the following from the seventy-second chapter,
as translated into sonorous English by Dr.
Wallis Budge :—
*' If this writing be known (by the deceased) upon
earth, and this chapter be done into writing upon (his)
coffin, he shall come forth by day in all the forms of
existence which he desireth, and he shall enter into (his)
place, and be not rejected. Bread and ale and meat
shall be given unto Osiris, the scribe Ani upon the altar
of Osiris . . . there shall wheat and barley be given
unto him ; there shall he flourish as he did upon earth,
and he shall do whatsoever pleaseth him, even as do the
gods who are in the underworld, for everlasting millions
of ages, world without end."
Under Dr. Wallis Budge's editorship, the
Ani papyrus has recently been supplemented
by the issue of facsimiles and translations of
papyri and other texts connected with the
Book of the Dead. Among these is a Book
of Breathings^ written in a late hieratic, and
I20 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
dating from late pre-Christian times. It con-
tains a ritual to be said by the priest for or
over the dead, and teaches belief in a resur-
rection of the body and a state of material
bhss on earth. "Thy soul shall live," and,
so runs the text, "thy corruptible body shall
burst into life, and thou shalt never decay"
..." Grant that his soul may go into every
place wheresoever it would be, and let him
live upon earth for ever and ever."
Up to a point the story of Egyptian writing
illustrates the stages of development of writing
generally so clearly that its recital, even at the
cost of some repetition, will be helpful, and the
more so as it falls into line with the story of
other scripts.
" It goes without saying " that the representa-
tion of an object was a simple matter enough,
the rudest draughtsmanship sufficing for a pic-
ture that should tell its own meaning at a glance.
But as soon as the need arose to graphically
express ideas, for example, such as vice and
virtue, time and space, health and sickness,
symbolism came in. To the illustrations of
this supplied by the scripts already dealt with
may be added a few examples from Egyptian
ideography, into which, at the stage that we
first meet it, the whole system of hieroglyphics
may be said to have become modified. The
bee was a symbol of kingship and also of
industry; a roll of papyrus denoted knowledge ;
an ostrich feather, justice, because these feathers
were supposed to be of equal length ; a palm
branch, one year, because that tree was popu-
EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS 121
larly believed to put forth a fresh branch every
new moon — although, as Mr. Gliddon suggests,
a more plausible reason is in the annual cutting
of the lower leaves close to the trunk. The
ideograph for a priest was a jackal — not, as may
be cynically hinted, because of his " devouring
widows' houses," but because of his watchful-
ness ; for a mother, a vulture, because that bird
was believed to nourish its young with its own
blood. Thirst was represented by a calf run-
ning towards water; power by a brandished
whip ; and battle by two arms, the one holding
a shield and the other a javelin. Among the
Dakotah Indians combat is indicated by two
arms pointed at each other. The ideograph
for night, a star pendant from a curve, is like
the Ojibwa; while among the ancient Mexicans
night was represented by a semicircle with eyes,
as stars, attached to it. Signs for hunger,
thirst, supplication, and so forth, among both
Innuit Indian and ancient Egyptian — as indeed
many other signs among peoples, both in the
old world and the new, whose writing has not
reached a purely phonetic stage — have that corre-
spondence to be expected when things common
to all men are graphically represented (fig. 46).
Running water, for example, remains necessarily
a pictograph, but water depicted in connection
with rites represents, by one symbol or another,
the varying nature of the latter. Both in Egypt
and Mexico it is represented flowing from a
vessel, the Egyptian ideograph having a kneel-
ing figure with arms uplifted, as if in adoration
or gratitude. There appears, also, some resem-
122
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
blance between the symbol for negation between
these two, but this has the doubt attaching to
all metaphysical interpretation of signs.
Obviously, this presentment of ideas through
graphic designs into which metaphor often
bordering on enigma had to be read, implied
good memories and clear grasp of association
on the part of the interpreter. Any doubt or
ambiguity, with resulting confusion, as to the
meaning of the symbol, rendered it worse than
Night
(Egyptian).
Night
(Maya).
/r-'^-Tx
Supplication Supplication Negation
(Egyptian). (Ojibwa). (Egyptian),
Negation
(Californian Indian).
Negation
(Maya).
f ^
Medicine Man God of Medicine
(Ojibwa). (Easter Island).
Fig. 46. — Comparative Ideographs
useless. Hence the addition of " determinants,"
concerning which something was said when
treating of the Chinese script (see p. 85).
These are of two classes — the special and more
numerous, w^hose use was confined to one word
or idea ; and the general, numbering about two
hundred, which, like the Chinese "keys," refer
to whole groups of words.
But ideas have to be arranged in sentences,
and these are made up of nouns, adjectives,
verbs, and other parts of speech for which
EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS I 23
symbolism, however ingenious, can make no
provision. Moreover, while the characters are
limited in their application, the ideas to be
expressed graphically are ever growing, and
hence, in course of time, there are not enough
symbols " to go round." A way of escape
opened itself, and thereby led to an invention
undreamed of, when recourse was had to the
use of pictures of things which were different
in sense, but the names of which had the same
sound ; in other words, to the pictorial pun
known as the rebus (see p. 79). As an
amusing instance of the formation of a com-
pound phonogram out of syllabic signs. Canon
Taylor quotes from an inscription of Ptolemy
XV. at Edfu, in which, as he says, " it seems
not impossible to detect a faint flavour of
ancient Egyptian humour. The name of lapis
lazuli y^d^s khesteh. Now the word /^/z^^ meant
' to stop,' and the syllable teb, ' a pig.' Hence
the rebus ' stop-pig ' was invented to express
graphically the name of lapis lazuli, which is
figured by the picture of a man stopping a pig
by pulling at its tail." Probably the Canon is
right, but in western lands that action is often
intended to make the pig move on. Another
example of the rebus occurs in the name of
Osiris, which in Egyptian is Hesiri (Wallis
Budge gives it as Ausir). The god, on this
showing, is represented, presumably, by a figure
on a seat, hes, and by an eye, iri. But with
the constant revision of interpretations by
Egyptologists, it behoves us to quote with
caution. There is a stock illustration as to the
124 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
adoption of the supposed picture of a lute (used
by the Egyptian scribes to denote " excellence "),
as a phonogram to express the word nefer^
" good." But it seems that what was thought to
be a lute is the picture of a heart and windpipe!
At last, we know not when, and we cannot,
speaking of Egypt alone, guess where, there
dawned upon some mind the fact that all the
words which men uttered are expressed by a
few sounds. Hence, what better plan than to
select from the big and confused mass of ideo-
grams, phonograms, and all their kin, a certain
number of signs to denote, unvaryingly, certain
sounds ?
That was the birth of the Alphabet, one of
thegreatest and most momentous triumphs of the
human mind. The earliest phonograms repre-
sented syllables, not individual letters, the dis-
tinguishing signs for vowels and consonants
being of yet later introduction ; in fact, some
alphabets, notably the Hebrew and other
Semitic, have no true vowels, but only dis-
tinguishing marks, diacritical points as they are
called, to denote them. To recapitulate, we
have I, picture-writing ; 2, ideograms ; 3, phono-
grams representing words ; 4, phonograms
representing syllables ; 5, alphabetic characters.
From their four hundred verbal phonograms
and syllabic signs the Egyptians of a remote
age — for it is literally true " that the letters of the
alphabet are older than the Pyramids '"' — appear
to have selected at the outset forty-five symbols
for alphabetic use, but the rare occurrence or
special use of some of these caused a further
EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS 1 25
reduction to twenty-five letters. "All that
remained to be done was to take one simple
step — boldly to discard all the non-alphabetic
elements, at once to sweep away the super-
fluous lumber, rejecting all the ideograms, the
homophones, the polyphones, the syllables, and
the symbolic signs to which the Egyptian
scribes so fondly clung, and so to leave re-
vealed in its grand simplicity the nearly perfect
alphabet, of which, without knowing it, the
Egyptians had been virtually in possession for
almost countless ages," (Taylor, i. 68.) That
step they never took, but continued the use of
eye-pictures side by side with that of ear-
pictures, instead of passing to the use of fixed
signs for certain sounds.
{b) The cursive writing known as Hieratic was
an abridged and conventionalised form of the
hieroglyphic. The use of the latter became
mainly restricted to monumental and kindred
purposes, while the hieratic was employed by
the priests in copying literary compositions,
notable among which was the Book of the
Dead, papyrus being the material most com-
monly used. This was made from the bybhcs
hieratiais or Cyperiis papyrus, a plant which
flourished in the marshy districts of the Nile.
There it has long been extinct, and is now
found only in Sicily. It would seem to have
served as many useful purposes to the ancient
Egyptians as the bamboo serves to-day to the
Chinese and other Orientals. " The roots were
used for firewood, parts of the plant were
eaten, and other and coarser parts were made
126 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
into paper, boats, ropes, mats, &c." In pre-
paring it for writing material, the outer rind
was removed and the pith then cut into strips,
which were laid side by side, with another set of
strips across them fastened by a thin solution
of gum, thus forming a sheet, which was pressed,
dried in the sun, and polished to a smooth
surface. The sheets were often joined to make
a roll, which was sometimes above one hundred
feet long and varied in width from six to seven-
teen inches. The finest papyri of the Book
of the Dead are about fifteen inches wide,
and, when they contain a tolerably large number
of chapters, are from eighty to ninety feet long.
Dipping his reed, which was either bruised at
the end to make it brush-like, or cut, pen-like,
to a point, in the ink-wells of his stone, wooden,
or sometimes ivory palette, which was often
dedicated to the god Thoth, " lord of divine
words," the professional scribe wrote the text
in varying colours, chiefly black or red, but
also in other tints imitative of the subject
dealt with, as blue for sky, yellow for woman,
and so forth.
The earliest known specimen of hieratic writ-
ing is a papyrus containing chronicles of the reign
of King Asa, whose date, according to a mode-
rate estimate of Egyptian chronology, is about
3580 B.C. To the same period the most perfect
literary work which has come down to us is
usually assigned, although the copy preserved
in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, whither
it was brought by M. Prisse d'Avennes from
Thebes, seems to have been written between 2700
EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS 1 27
and 2500 B.C. This valuable relic, commonly
known after its donor as the Papyrus Prisse,
is entitled the " Precepts of Ptah-Hetep," and
its contents justify the judgment of Dr. Wallis
Budge, that ''if all other monuments of the
great civilisation of Egypt were wanting, it
alone would show the moral worth of the
Egyptians, and the high ideals of man's duties
which they had formed nearly five thousand
five hundred years ago.''
{c) The Demotic or Enchorial characters pre-
serve but slight traces of their derivation from
picture-writing. As the term hieratic (Greek
hieratikos, sacerdotal) denotes the class by whom
that writing was used, so the terms demotic
(Greek demotikos, of the people) and enchorial
(Greek enchbrios^ of the country) denote that
this writing was in popular use, being adapted
to the purposes of daily life. It appears to
have come into use about 900 B.C., and so con-
tinued till the fourth century of our era. It has
been shown that in the time of Darius and other
rulers of the Achaemean dynasty, proclama-
tions and documents of general importance
were set forth in three languages — Babylonian,
Medic, and Persian. So, ■ in the time of the
Ptolemies, who inherited the Egyptian posses-
sions of Alexander the Great and ruled in the
Nile Valley till it fell under the sway of Rome, all
matters of public importance were made known
in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek characters.
The hieroglyphic was called the "writing of
divine words"; the demotic, "writing of letters";
and the Greek, " writing of the Greeks."
CHAPTER VII
THE ROSETTA STONE
The expressions given above occur on the
famous Rosetta Stone, an inscribed slab of
black basalt, which has proved to be of price-
less value in supplying the key to the interpre-
tation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, thus fulfilling a
purpose corresponding to that of the Behistun
rock inscriptions in the interpretation of cunei-
form writing. The slab — which is preserved in
the British Museum — takes its name from its
discovery among the ruins of a fort near the
Rosetta mouth of the Nile, where it was found
by a French officer in 1799. On the capitula-
tion of Alexandria to the British, the stone,
whose importance had been detected by the
savants attached, by the foresight of Napoleon,
to his expedition, came by good fortune under
the charge of Sir William Hamilton, whose
interest in Egyptian antiquities was keen. It
is not perfect, but enough has survived to
suffice for decipherment of the general tenor
of the inscriptions. Speculation as to the
meaning of the hieroglyphs had been rife for
centuries, for although they remained in use
one hundred and fifty years after the Ptole-
mies began to reign (305 B.C.), and although
THE ROSETTA STONE 1 29
the names of Roman emperors were written in
them as late as the third century a.d., only a
few among the classical writers whose works we
possess have anything of value to say on the
matter. It was not until the early decades
of the present century that the ingenuity of
two Egyptologists, Young and Champollion,
working independently (as, years later, Adams
and Leverrier worked at the problem of the
discovery of Neptune), wrested their secret
from the hieroglyphs. Honour lies only in
lesser degree with some immediate predecessors,
among them Zoega, who rightly conjectured
that the oblong rings enclosed royal names,
because these " cartouches," as they are called,
appeared above the series of sitting figures in
temple sculptures ; and Akerblad, who pub-
lished an alphabet of the demotic characters on
the Rosetta Stone.
Dr. Thomas Young was a very remarkable
man. Born of Quaker parents in 1773, he
gave his youth to literature, languages, and
mechanics, and at thirty won the Fellowship
of the Royal Society, having two years before
then accepted the Professorship of Natural
Philosophy at the Royal Institution. Made
easy in circumstances by a legacy from a rela-
tive, he applied himself yet more strenuously
to physics and philology. The result of his
labours in the one was the discovery of the
undulatory nature of light (which has its
analogy in sound-waves), in opposition to
Newton's corpuscular or emission theory ; and,
in the other, a partial decipherment of the
demotic characters, and correct identification
130 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
of the names of a few of the Egyptian gods
— Ra, Nut, Thoth, Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys
— and of the names Ptolemy and Berenice.
He died in 1829.
Jean Frangois Champollion, of whom Dr.
Walhs Budge speaks as " the immortal dis-
coverer of a correct system of decipherment of
Egyptian hieroglyphics," was born in 1790.
Like Young, he betook himself early to the
study of languages, and at the age of thirteen
was "master of a fair knowledge of Hebrew,
Syriac, and Chaldee." In his twenty-second
year he became Professor of Ancient History
to the Faculty of Letters at Grenoble, and, with
a certain impulse to the quest given by acquain-
tance with the labours of Young and others,
he revised their system and developed his own,
making tours to the museums of Turin, Rome,
and Naples for the study of papyri, and passing
thence to Egypt, where he secured a large body
of materials. Death overtook him in 1832, but
not before he had accomplished the chief aim
of his life in demonstrating that the hieroglyphic
characters are partly pictures of objects and
partly signs of sounds.
Although the Rosetta Stone was the base of
decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the
success following Champollion's labours is
largely due to the discovery of a small obelisk
in the island of Philse. This obelisk was said
to have been fixed in a socket bearing a Greek
inscription containing a petition of the priests
of Isis at Philae, addressed to Ptolemy, to
Cleopatra his sister, and to Cleopatra his wife.
The hieroglyphic inscription upon the obelisk
THE ROSETTA STONE I3I
itself included certain characters within a car-
touche which were identical with those within
the only cartouche occurring on the Rosetta
Stone. Here, then, was a clue, which was the
more easily followed
up because the
names of Ptolemy
and Cleopatra have,
in the Greek, cer-
tain letters in common which could be used for
comparison with the hieroglyphics. " If the
characters which are similar in these two names
express the same sound in each cartouche, their
Fig, 47.— Ptolemy
A
If]
Fig. 48.— Cleopatra
purely phonetic character is at once made clear,"
and the recovery of the Egyptian alphabet was
only a question of time (figs. 47, 48, 49).
The Rosetta Stone is inscribed with frag-
Kaisars (cjCsar) a. Takrtr (autokrator)
Fig. 49
ments of fourteen lines of hieroglyphics, thirty-
two Hues of demotic, and fifty-four lines of
Greek. These have for their subject-matter a
decree of the priesthood assembled at Memphis
in honour of Ptolemy V. Epiphanes, King of
132 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
Egypt, B.C. 195. They set forth the beneficent
deeds of that monarch, in his consecration of
revenues of silver and corn to the temples, his
abolition of certain taxes and reduction of
others, his grant of privileges to the priests
and soldiers, and his undertaking at his own
cost, in the eighth year of his reign, when the
Nile rose to so great a height as to flood all
the plains, the task of damming it and direct-
ing the overflow of its waters into proper
channels, to the great gain and benefit of the
agricultural classes. Besides his remissions of
taxes, he gave handsome gifts to the temples,
and subscribed to the various ceremonies con-
nected with public worship. In return for
these gracious acts, the priests assembled at
Memphis decreed that a statue of the king
should be set up in a conspicuous place in
every temple of Egypt, and inscribed with the
names and titles of " Ptolemy, the saviour of
Egypt." Royal apparel was to be placed on the
statues, and ceremonies were to be performed
before them three times a day. It was also de-
creed that a gilded wooden shrine, containing
a gilded wooden statue of the king, should be
placed in each temple, and that these were to be
carried out with the shrines of the other kings
in the great panegyrics. It was also decreed
that ten golden crowns of a peculiar design
should be made and laid upon the royal
shrine; that the birthday and coronation day
of the king should be celebrated each year
with great pomp and show ; that the first five
days of the month of Thoth should each year
THE ROSETTA STONE I33
be set apart for the performance of a festival in
honour of the king ; and, finally, that a copy of
this decree, engraved upon a tablet of hard
stone in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek
characters, should be set up in each of the
temples of the first, second, and third orders,
near the statue of the ever-living Ptolemy.
Dr. Wallis Budge adds that "the Greek por-
tion of the inscriptions appears to be the
original document, and the hieroglyphic and
demotic versions merely translations of it."
{The Muvwiy^ pp. no, in.)
As the principle of interpretation is the same
for all the inscriptions, and as the key to that
interpretation is knowledge of one of the lan-
guages in which the inscription occurs, brief
reference to another historical tablet often
bracketed with the Rosetta Stone will suffice.
This is known as the Stele of Canopus, which
also bears inscriptions in hieroglyphic, demotic,
and Greek. It is about half a century earlier
than the Rosetta Stone, and was set up at
Canopus in the ninth year of the reign of
Ptolemy III. to record a decree made by the
priesthood there assembled in honour of the
king. It recites acts similar in their beneficent
character to those recounted of Ptolemy V., and
decrees what honours shall be paid him and
his consort Berenice, whose famous hair, dedi-
cated in the temple of Arsinoe at Zephyrium
in gratitude for Ptolemy's safe return from his
Syrian expedition, was said to have been meta-
morphosed into the constellation known as
Coma Berenices.
CHAPTER VIII
EGYPTIAN WRITING IN ITS RELATION TO
OTHER SCRIPTS
The interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics
being thus settled once and for all, the next
problem to be attacked was their relation, if
any, to the sound-signs whence are derived the
alphabets of the civilised world. We travel
backwards along clearly-marked lines from our
alphabet to the Roman, and thence to the
Greek, which tradition attributed to the Phoe-
nicians. Herodotus says upon this matter:
'• Now these Phoenicians who came with Cad-
mos, of whom were the Gephyraians, brought
in among the Hellenes many arts when they
settled in this land of Bceotia, and especially
letters, which did not exist, as it appears to me,
among the Hellenes before this time ; and at
first they brought in those which are used by
the Phoenician race generally, but afterwards,
as time went on, they changed with their
speech the form of the letters also. During
this time the lonians were the race of Hellenes
who dwelt near them in most of the places
where they were ; and these, having received
letters by instruction of the Phoenicians, changed
EGYPTIAN WRITING 1 35
their form slightly and so made use of them^
and in doing so they declared them to- be
called ' Phoenicians/ as was just, seeing that the
Phoenicians had introduced them into Hellas.
Also, the lonians from ancient time call paper
'skins,' because formerly, paper being scarce^
they used skins of goats and sheep ; nay, even
in my own time many of the Barbarians wrote
on such skins" (v. 58).
Pliny, in his Natural History (v. 12, 13),
gives the credit of the invention of the alphabet
to the Phoenicians, and other ancient authors
repeat what must have been an old tradition.
The honesty of these writers is unimpeachable,
however much their competency may be ques-
tioned ; and no slight confirmation of their
testimony appears, in the judgment of many
modern scholars, to be furnished by the corre-
spondence in number, name (the sibilants s and
z excepted), and order, although not in form,
between the letters of the Greek and the
Semitic alphabets. " In default of further
evidence, the very word Alphabet," Canon
Taylor remarks, " might suffice to disclose the
secret of its origin. It is obviously derived
from the names of the two letters alpha and
beta, which stand at the head of the Greek
alphabet, and which are plainly identical with
the names aleph and beth borne by the corre-
sponding Semitic characters. These names,
which are meaningless in Greek, are significant
Semitic words, aleph denoting an 'ox,' and beth
a ' house.' " The following table shows the
names and order of the Greek and Semitic
136 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
letters, the Hebrew being selected as the type
of a Semitic alphabet, because it is more
familiar than any other {cf. Taylor's History
of the Alphabet^ vol. i. p. 75).
HEBREW.
GREEK.
Name.
Meaning.
Name.
^^ Aleph
OX
A a
Alpha
2 Beth
house
B /3g
Beta
J Gimel
camel
r y
Gamma
1 Daleth
door
A 5
Deha
HHe
window
E e
Epsilon
1 Vau
hook
(Vau-
-obsolete)
T Zayin
weapons
z C
Zeta
n Cheth
fence
H r.
Eta
D Teth
serpent ?
e ^Q
Theta
> Yod
hand
I I
Iota
3 Kaph
palm of
hand
ox-goad
K K
Kappa
7 Lamed
A X
Lambda
D Mem
waters
M /z
Mu
3 Nun
fish
N V
Nu
D Samekh
post
3 ^
Xi
-};> 'Ayin
eye
Omicron
3 Pe
mouth
n TT
Pi
iJ Tsade
javelin ?
(San—
-lost)
P Qoph
knot?
(Koppa— obsolete) |
n Resh
head
P p
Rho
t:^Shin
teeth
2 o-ff
Sigma
JlTau
mark
T r
Tau
Y i;
Upsilon '
.=
* (/)
Phi
X X
Chi
- u
^ v^
Psi
J
12 0)
Omega ,
^
EGYPTIAN WRITING 1 37
Assuming the theory of the Phoenician origin
of the alphabet to be estabUshed, the next
question is, was that alphabet an independent
invention, or was it adapted from another set
of characters ? As has been seen, all evidence
goes to show that sound-signs have been de-
rived from pictographsj and, if the Phoenician
script be no exception to this, search must be
made for its earlier forms. Tradition asserted
that " the Phoenicians did not claim to be them-
selves the inventors of the art of writing, but
admitted that it was obtained by them from
Egypt." So says Eusebius, and the same tradi-
tion has currency among classic authorities
from Plato to Tacitus, while the fact of the
active intercourse which long prevailed between
Phoenicia and Egypt goes far in its support.
The Phoenicians were of Semitic race, "dwelling
in ancient time, as they themselves report, upon
the Erythrean Sea" {i.e. in the neighbourhood
of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf), "and
thence they passed over and dwelt in the
country along the sea coast of Syria ; and this
part of Syria and all as far as Egypt is called
Palestine" (Herodotus, vii. 89). But of their
origin and primitive migrations, in truth, little
is known. Tyre, whose king, Hiram, gave
Solomon aid in the building of his famous
temple, and Sidon, are familiar names in the
Bible, but that of the " Phoenicians " does not
once occur, reference to them being probably
included in the term "Canaanite." Professor
Huxley, always felicitous in his phrases as he was
supreme in exposition, aptly called them the
138 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
" colossal pedlars " of the ancient world. The
narrow strip of Syrian seaboard which they
occupied when we first meet them in history
was a meeting-place between East and West,
and the nursery of a maritime enterprise which
looms large in history. Their ships traded west-
ward beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and east-
ward to the Indian Ocean ; their colonists settled
on both shores of the Mediterranean, on the
Euxine, and were scattered over Asia Minor.
Like the Romans, the Phoenicians had little
creative instinct. Designing or discovering little,
but skilfully manufacturing and circulating much,
they were distributors of the wares of their own
and neighbouring countries, and founded em-
poria in many a city of the ancient world, as
e.g. at Memphis, " round about whose sacred
enclosure, on that side of the temple of Hephais-
tos which faces the north wind, dwell Phoeni-
cians of Tyre, this whole region being called
the camp of the Tyrians," or, as we should say,
the Tyrian quarter (Herodotus, ii. 112).
Obviously, one of the pressing needs of a
people thus brimful of commercial activity, to
whom " time was money," would be some swift
and concise mode of record of transactions.
Hence the supersession or abbreviation of cum-
brous and elaborated characters, with their appa-
ratus of determinatives, ideograms, and the like,
by a simple " shorthand " sort of script. But of
z£'/^^z/ characters ? Influenced partly by the tradi-
tions already referred to, partly by the fact of
the intimate relations between Phoenicia and
Egypt, and doubtless by that principle of de-
EGYPTIAN WRITING 1 39
velopment the application of which was extend-
ing in all directions, a French Egyptologist,
Emanuel de Rouge, read a paper on the history
of the alphabet before the Academie des In-
scriptions in 1859 (the year of pubHcation of
Darwin's Origin of Species)^ which, in the
judgment of many scholars, appeared con-
clusive as to the derivation of the Phoenician
(and, through that, of all other alphabets now in
use) from the Egyptian characters. The success
which appeared to attend M. de Rouge's re-
searches "must be attributed to his clear per-
ception of the fact, itself antecedently probable,
that the immediate prototypes of the Semitic
letters must be sought, not, as had hitherto been
vainly attempted, among the hieroglyphic pic-
tures of the Egyptian monuments, but among
the cursive characters which the Egyptians had
developed out of their hieroglyphs, and which
were employed for literary and secular pur-
poses, the hieroglyphic writing being reserved
for monumental and sacred uses" (Taylor, i.
p. 90). The method which he adopted was
admirable. He took the oldest known forms
of the Semitic letters that he could discover,
and compared these with the oldest known forms
of hieratic writing, confining that comparison to
the twenty-five letters of the so-called " Egyptian
Alphabet." The materials at his command were
of the scantiest. On the Egyptian side hieratic
papyri of the new Empire (which began about
1587 B.C.) existed in plenty, but the characters
in which they are written are comparatively
late. Fortunately, however, among the very few
140 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
examples of the oldest form of hieratic was the
Papyrus Prisse (fig. 50), and this precious relic
supplied M. de Rouge with the cursive characters
which made formulation of his theory possible.
On the Se7?ittic side there are the Egyptian words
which are given in Semitic form in the Old
Testament, and the Semitic names of Syrian
towns which are found in the Egyptian annals
of conquests under the new Empire, through
which the sounds severally represented by the
Semitic and hieratic characters are arrived at.
The chief source of epigraphic evidence was
^
<^
*^
^in
Fig. 50. — Facsimile of Hieratic Papyrus Prisse
an inscription (fig. 51) on the sarcophagus of
Eshmunazar, king of Sidon, dating from the fifth
century B.C., or about two thousand years later
than the Papyrus Prisse, and therefore repre-
senting a late form of the Phoenician alphabet.
The sarcophagus, which is preserved in the
Louvre, was found in a rock-tomb near the site
of ancient Sidon. The interpretation of the
inscription upon it has exercised the skill of a
host of scholars, and given rise to an enormous
body of literature. Eshmunazar, whose mask
and mummy are sculptured on the sarcophagus,
EGYPTIAN WRITING I4I
speaks in the first person. He calls himself
"king of the Sidonians, son of Tabnit," and
tells how he and his mother, the
priestess of Ashtaroth, had built
temples to Baal Sidon, Ashtaroth,
and Emun. He beseeches the
favour of the gods, and prays that
Dora, Joppa, and the fertile corn-
lands of Sharon may ever remain
part of his kingdom. Well-nigh in t^jsa-^^^
the words of Shakespeare's epitaph,
he lays a curse upon him who would ^
molest his grave ; such an one ^^
" shall have no funeral couch with '^
the Rephaim," that haunt the vasty
halls of death. " I am cut off be-
fore my time ; few have been my ^
days, and I am lying in this coffin 5^^^^5\ -
and in this tomb in the place ^[r** §
which I have built. Oh, then,
remember this ! may no royal
race, may no man open my funeral ^i^.^.^^ a
couch, and may they not seek after <4^**=»» |_
treasure, for no one has hidden
treasures here, nor move the coffin
out of my funeral couch, nor molest r^p^
me in this funeral bed by putting ^
in it another tomb." (^Records of
D
bid
1
Maeander .
m
m
^ ^
E
e
£
^
E
ee
n
Cerastes .
^
^
f y
YF
f
f^
F
ff
T
Duck . . 1
1^
z
t
:
I
z
KC
t
2
z
t
Sieve . .
%
CP
s
B
H
H
hT?
B
H
nh
rr
Tongs . .
^
^=K
ffi
e
^^
®
t2
Parallels .
\\
9
\
^
1
1
t
1
1
'J
««
Bowl . .
^c=:*>
^
7
A
K
K
K K
K
K
k
5
Lioness . .
S^
^
i
\/
A
A
A
U,
L
I 1
^.
Owl . . .
k
3^
7
M
A
M'
at//
r
/^^
CQ m
—
Water . .
^*™
*^
1
^
A/
N
//K
r
N
71 n
:i
Chair-back
—
W+-.
%
1
—
i
e
a
+
X X
D
—
y
Shutter . .
1
*t>
?
n
r
IT
7T tiJ
p
p
P
D
Snake . •
^
/
r
r
M
^
r
i*
Angle . .
n
'A
9
9
9
9
Q
qq
1
Mouth . .
<=>
<^
i
i^
p
P
9 e
1^
R
P r
Inundated \
Garden /
w
^
w
^
(
c
c cr
5
S
/fs
li^
L=:
Lasso . .
}
^
+
T
T
T
r
T
T
C t
n
'
II III
,v
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
144 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
Our examples of M. de Rouge's method may
be taken from the letters b and h.
b. The Egyptians had two signs for this, the
''leg," 1/ which is the normal sign, and the
"crane" (see fig. 2 in foregoing table), which
letter should be taken as the prototype of the
Phoenician (see fig. 2, col. iii.). The reason
may be that the sound of the first symbol seems
to have been nearer to v than to b, the " crane "
being used as the equivalent of beth in the
translation of several Semitic names, such as
Berytus (Beyrout) and Khirba. The hieratic
trace of the "leg" would, moreover, be easily
confused with that of some other letters, such
as the "chick" and the "arm," and would
therefore be inconvenient for adoption. The
Semitic character A differs from its hieratic
prototype A in having acquired a closed
loop. The closed form is so much easier to
write that the change presents no difficulty.
But there is a curious bit of indirect evidence
which seems to show that the Semitic in its
earlier form was open, something in the shape
of an S. The Greek alphabet used at Corinth,
one of the earliest Phoenician colonies in
Hellas, must have been derived from a type of
the Semitic alphabet more archaic than that
which appears on the Moabite Stone (see p. 147).
Now, in the old Corinthian alphabet the letter
beta is not closed, but open, T, its form being
almost identical with the hieratic prototype.
EGYPTIAN WRITING 1 45
h. The letter he corresponds to the " maean-
der" and the "knotted cord." The hieratic
forms show that the former must be taken as
the prototype. In the Papyrus Prisse there are
two of this character ; one, which is compara-
tively rare, is open at the bottom, /77» and
corresponds to the Moabite 3. It is much
more usual, however, to find the character com-
pletely closed. The name of the Semitic letter,
which is generally supposed to mean a " win-
dow," would indicate that the previous form of
the letter agreed with the more usual hieratic
trace. This conjecture is curiously confirmed
by the evidence afforded by the early inscrip-
tions of Corinth, which, as we have seen in the
case of beta^ occasionally preserve alphabetic
forms of a more archaic type than those found
on the Moabite Stone itself. Now, in the primi-
tive alphabet of Corinth we find, instead of the
usual form of epsilo7i^ a closed character SI,
which is nearly identical with the form of the
" mceander," most usual in the Papyrus Prisse.
(Taylor, i. pp. 102, 114.)
Among the more important Semitic inscrip-
tions, other than that on the Eshmunazar sar-
cophagus, are: (i) the inscription on fragments
of sacred vessels of bronze from the temple of
Baal Lebanon, which is assigned to the eleventh
century B.C. ; (2) the inscription of Mesha, king
of Moab, on a slab of black basalt, known as
the Moabite Stone, which is assigned to the
K
146
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
ninth century B.C.
(3) the lion weights from
Nineveh, bearing the
names of Assyrian
kings who reigned
during the second
half of the eighth
century B.C. ; and (4)
the inscription on a
tablet in a tunnel
which conveys water
from the Virgin's
Pool in the Kedron
Valley to the Pool
of Siloam in the
Tyropaeon. The
date of this inscrip-
tion lies between the
eighth and the sixth
centuries B.C.
I. The Baal Leba-
non Vessels. In 1876
M. Clermont-Ganneau
bought from a Cypri-
ote dealer some frag-
ments of bronze plates
bearing Phoenician
characters (fig. 52).
They were traced to
a peasant who had
found them when dig-
ging, and who had
broken up the metal
in the hope that it was of gold. The industry
and skill of MM. Renan and Clermont-Ganneau
EGYPTIAN WRITING
147
pieced the fragments together in such wise as
to warrant the inference that they were portions
of sacred bowls, an infer-
ence confirmed by the
longest of the in-
scriptions, which de-
clared that " this
vessel of good
bronze was of-
fered by a citi-
zen of Carthage,
servant of Hi-
ram, king of
the Sidonians,
to Baal Leba-
non, his Lord," 1
whose temple
was one of the
" high places "
dedicated to
the god.
2. The Moa-
bite Stone (fig.
53). This, per-
haps the most
famous, and, cer-
tainly, one of the
most important,
Semitic relics, was d
covered in 1868 by Dr.
Klein, a German mis-
sionary, during his travels
in Moab. The Arabs who escorted him took
him to see an inscribed stone, the Phoenician
148 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
characters on which were beautifully cut in
thirty- four lines. The doctor copied a few
words, and resumed his journey. On reaching
Jerusalem he made known his discovery, where-
upon competition was started between the French
and German Consulates for purchase of the
coveted treasure. This aroused the suspicion
of the Arabs, to whom the stone had become
a sort of talisman on which the fertility of their
crops depended — that is, when they had in-
dustry enough to plant them. Messengers sent
by M. Clermont-Ganneau succeeded in taking
a squeeze of the inscription, which made the
Arabs still more hostile, and in the end, after
the Turkish governor of Nablus had vainly tried
to secure the stone for himself — of course to sell
at a profit to the " infidel " — the Arabs put a fire
under it, then poured cold water over it, and
smashed it into fragments, which were distributed
as charms among the tribe. But the tact of M.
Clermont-Ganneau recovered nearly all the
pieces, so that, a few lines excepted, the in-
scription is complete. The original is pre-
served in the Louvre, and a very good cast of it
may be seen in the Phoenician department of
the British Museum.
The inscription, which is written in a lan-
guage resembling closely the Hebrew of the
Old Testament, gives Mesha's account of his
rebellion against the King of Israel, to whom
he had hitherto paid yearly tribute of the wool
of a hundred thousand lambs and a hundred
thousand rams. Historically the monument
is of high value. Mesha speaks of himself
EGYPTIAN WRITING 1 49
as the son of Chemoshmelek, whose position
as the national god of the petty kingdom
of Moab corresponds to that of Yahweh or
Jehovah among the IsraeHtes. The reference
to Chemosh throws Hght on the correspondences
in belief between the several Semitic peoples.
The "high place" or altar of the god, his
anthropomorphic character as angry, as urging
his votaries to battle and to slaughter of their
foes, giving them no quarter — all this is identical
with the Hebrew conception of deity, so that
the inscription, 7nutaiis mutandis^ reads like a
transcript from the warlike annals of the Old
Testament. From the epigraphic standpoint,
which alone concerns us here, the inscription is
regarded by Canon Taylor and other scholars
as supporting the theory of M. de Rouge.
3. The Lion Weights (fig. 54). Several ex-
amples of these were found by the late Sir Austin
Layard in his first excavations at Nineveh.
They are bilingual, the names of the Assyrian
kings being usually in cuneiform writing, while
the weights are indicated in Phoenician char-
acters. Of course this evidences intimate trading
relations between Assyria and Phoenicia, and the
commercial dominance of the latter in the adop-
tion of its weights and measures as the metrical
standard of the former, and in the general use
of the Phoenician alphabet for business pur-
poses. The action of time has largely obliter-
ated the inscriptions, but among the names of
Assyrian kings which have been identified are
Tiglath-Peser, Shalmaneser IV., Sargon II.,
and Sennacherib. The similarity between the
I50
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
Phoenician and Assyrian characters is shown
in the inscription here reproduced, which is to
scale of the original. It is on the eleventh
1
Fig. 54.— Maneh Weight
\
lion, which weighs a little over twenty ounces,
and therefore represents a maneh, a Hebrew
weight used in estimating gold and silver, and
EGYPTIAN WRITING 15I
believed to contain one hundred shekels of the
former and sixty of the latter. The reading is
M<^N^H ue-LeK, "a maneh of the king." The
name is not very legible, but is read by
Professor Sayce as Shalmaneser, who reigned
in the seventh century B.C.
4. T/ie Siloam Inscription. — The tunnel in
which this was found was doubtless constructed
to secure the water supply of Jerusalem in the
event of a siege, the Virgin's Pool being outside
the city walls, while the Pool of Siloam is
inside the boundaries of the old rampart.
Encrustations of carbonate of lime made the
decipherment of the letters very difficult on
their first discovery in 1880, but enough was
seen to prove their high importance for the
study of the development of the Hebrew
alphabet in its passage from the Phoenician to
the Aramean type, whence the modern char-
acters are derived. *' It was recognised at once
that a Hebrew inscription of a date prior to
the Captivity had at last been discovered, and
that the uncertainties as to the nature of the
alphabet of Israel would now be set at rest."
The letters were carefully cleared of their
accretion ; squeezes, • tracings, and casts were
obtained, and the Hebrew record, engraved in
Phoenician characters nearly resembling those
on the Moabite Stone, thus Englished, of course
more or less conjecturally in detail, by Professor
Sayce : —
(i) (Behold the) excavation ! Now this is the history
of the tunnel. While the excavators (were lifting up)
(2) the pick each to his neighbour, and while there
152 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
were yet three cubits (to be broken through) ... the
voice of one call-
(3) -ed to his neighbour, for there was (an excess ?) in
the rock on the right. They rose up . . . they struck
on the west of the
(4) excavation, the excavators struck each to meet his
neighbour pick to pick, and there flowed
(5) the waters from their outlet to the Pool for the
distance of looo cubits and (three-fourths ?)
(6) of a cubit was the height of the rock at the head
of the excavation here.
The inscription is interesting if only as
showing how modern methods of tunnelling
were anticipated by these ancient engineers.
One gang of men began boring at one end and
another gang at the other end, thus advancing
till both met, and the failure to make the con-
nection which is spoken of in "the (excess) in the
rock on the right " has confirmation in the exist-
ence of two " blind alleys " in the tunnel, show-
ing how the borings overlapped. The accuracy
with which, aided by the most recent appliances
worked by compressed air, the passages through
miles of rock have been bored until the men
at either end meet face to face in the middle,
is among the romantic achievements of modern
science. The Samaritan alphabet is the sole
surviving lineal descendant of the Phoenician,
which in whatever degree the parent of all
extant alphabets, became extinct with the de-
cline of Phoenicia herself, and the characters are
now recoverable only through the inscriptions
of which examples have been given.
M. de Rouge's theory of the source of that
alphabet, and of the variants to which it has given
EGYPTIAN WRITING 153
rise, has not passed unchallenged. It belongs to
the class of hypotheses which lend themselves
to the straining of facts in their support,
and therefore demand evidence amounting to
demonstration. The superficial resemblances
between the written characters are cited as
proof of relation, no play being given to that
independence of origin of which numerous
examples occur in other branches of human
development. In his article on Hieroglyphics
in the Encydopcedia Britannica^ Mr. Reginald
Poole remarks that "the hieratic forms vary,
like all cursive forms of writing, with the hand
of each scribe. Consequently, the writers who
desire to establish their identity with Phoeni-
cian can scarcely avoid straining the evidence."
Moreover, the long lapse of time between the
materials for comparison invites caution. The
Papyrus Frisse is, at least, two thousand years
older than the Eshmunazar inscription, and on
these two hang the validity of M. de Rouge's
theory. Another contention is that certain
Semitic letters represent sounds which are
peculiar to that language, and for which no
equivalent signs could be adopted from the
Egyptian, to which, however, the reply is that
in the borrowing of characters it suffices to
select those representing similar, although not
the same, sounds. The objection that the
names of the Semitic letters are not those of
the hieroglyphs is met by the principle of
aerology (see pp. 86, 104). The question is also
asked. Why did not the Phoenicians borrow the
hieroglyphic instead of the hieratic characters ?
154 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
Mr. Arthur Evans thinks that in some cases
this was done, a few of the letters of the
Phoenician alphabet coming direct from the
pictorial symbols, as Alpha {Aief=2in ox),
from the hieroglyph of an ox's head; Zeta
(s«j/;z = weapons), from the two-edged axe;
Sigjua {samech = a post), from the sign of a tree ;
Oviikro7i (Ain = an eye), from the circle used to
represent the eye ; JS/a and E-psilon {cheth = a
fence and He = a window), from signs for a wall
or door or window. Canon Taylor, however,
argues that the derivation must have been on
the lines laid down by M. de Rouge, the Semitic
alphabet originating among a colony of aliens of
that race settled in Lower Egypt, either as slaves,
traders, frontier guards, or conquerors. In any
case these intruders would be strangers to the
religion and the language of the Egyptians.
It would, therefore, be more likely that they
should make use of the cursive and easy hieratic,
which was ordinarily employed in Egypt for
secular and commercial purposes, than that
they should adopt the difficult sacred script
which was reserved by the Egyptian priesthood
for monumental and religious uses. This sup-
position is confirmed by the singular absence
of any hieroglyphic monument which can be
assigned to the three dynasties of Semitic rulers
known as the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings, who
were expelled from Lower Egypt by the Theban
Ramesides.
Canon Taylor admits that if, among the
objections raised by Professor Lagarde, that
based on the want of adequate resemblance
EGYPTIAN WRITING 1 55
between the Semitic letters and the hieratic
forms can be sustained, M. de Rouge's theory-
falls to the ground. The Canon, a staunch,
although perfectly candid, supporter of that
theory, very properly lays stress on the tendency
of things borrowed to partake of the character
of the borrower. That they are borrowed at all
implies a certain adaptableness in them which
permits modification of type, especially when
the writing has to be inscribed on another kind
of material. The early hieratic writing was
traced on papyrus with a soft reed-stump, while
the Semitic was cut upon a stone with a chisel,
to the loss of flowing lines and curves. " Looking
broadly at the two scripts. Hieratic and Moabite,
we see in the first place that the Semitic writing
is distinguished by greater symmetry and greater
simplicity. The letters have become more
regular and uniform : more angular, more firm,
and more erect ; the differences in relative size
have diminished ; the complicated and diffi-
cult characters especially being straightened or
curtailed." {^History of the Alphabet^ i, 125.)
Summing up the several objections, of which
only the more important have been noted here.
Canon Taylor, amending nothing in the recent
reprint of his book, remains satisfied as to the
soundness of M. de Rouge's theory. "Not
only is it on a priori grounds the probable
solution, not only does it agree with the ancient
tradition, not only does it supply a possible and
reasonable explanation of the facts, not only is
it confirmed by all sorts of curious coincidences,
but no objection has been urged against it
156 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
to which a sufficient answer cannot be found.
If we reject M. de Rouge's explanation of the
origin of the alphabet, there is practically no
rival theory on which to fall back. There are
only three other possible sources, none of
which can, at present, be regarded in any higher
hght than as a mere guess. If the Semitic
letters were not derived from Egypt they must
have been invented by the Phoenicians, or they
must have been developed either out of the
Hittite hieroglyphics, or out of one of the
cuneiform syllabaries." {lb., p. 130.) The
possible relation of the still undeciphered
Hittite hieroglyphs to other scripts will have
reference presently, and perhaps Deecke's theory
of the derivation of the Phoenician from the
Assyrian cuneiform has some measure of truth
in it. For cuneiform appears to be essentially
a Semitic script, and the Phoenicians in their
contact with other Semitic peoples would, it
may be assumed, have retained and adapted
some, if not all, of the cuneiform characters
long before they became familiar with Egyptian
hieroglyphic or hieratic. Granting, however,
all that the upholders of M. de Rouge's theory
may demand, their inference as to the direct con-
nection between the Greek and other alphabets
and the Phoenician alphabet is not necessarily
to be accepted. On this question of relation
new and important light is thrown by recent
discoveries, whose significance will be dealt
with in the following section.
CHAPTER IX
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS
When treating of the sources whence civilisa-
tion flowed westward centuries before Greece
and Rome appear, the historian turns to the
valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. For
Egypt and Chaldea have meant so much to us
all in our search after the chief influences on
man's intellectual and spiritual history, and
this with increasing warrant, because the more
widely investigation is pushed, the more vener-
able is the past of both countries found to have
been. In the case of Babylon we have seen
that the art of writing — that index of culture —
had passed the pictographic stage long before
eight thousand years ago, while the Egyptian
hieroglyphs, which probably came in with the
dynasties, and therefore date from the reign of
Menes, the first historical king, are some thirteen
hundred years later, so far as their use in the
Nile Valley is concerned. Hence the Baby-
lonian script carries the palm in point of age.
Fortunately the records of both these ancient
civilisations are fairly continuous, of Babylonia
to the downfall of the empire, and of Egypt to
the present time. Assessing the contributions
158 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
of each to human progress, the verdict appears
to be in favour of Babylonia, and " we now
know that, high as was the development of
Egyptian civilisation in certain directions, it
was by no means the fertile mother of other
civiHsations. All modern writers are agreed
that religious cults and national customs are
exactly what the Greeks did not borrow from
Egypt, any more than the Hebrews bor-
rowed thence their religion, or the Phoenicians
their commerce." (Mr. Percy Gardner's Neiv
Chapters in Greek History, p. 193.) But if
Egypt was no " house of bondage " to Israel,
it has been the enslaver of Christendom. It
fettered a faith, which had flourished in the
freedom of the spirit, with Trinitarianism, Mari-
olatry, and Monasticism. Out of one or another
of its triads emerged the dogma of the Christian
Trinity, and in the child Horus, seated in the
lap of Isis, we see the profound significance of
the words, "Out of Egypt have I called my
Son." The obelisk that fronts St. Peter's at
Rome symbolises the historical fact that ap-
proach to the Christian Church is through the
pronaos of the Egyptian temple.
Explorations in Greece and the surrounding
archipelago within the last few years have
brought to light a third venerable centre of cul-
ture. About thirty years ago Dr. Schliemann,
digging in prehistoric soil, believed that he had
found the palace of Odysseus and the towers
of Ilios. "The bones of Agamemnon are a
show." The world laughed at him, but, if it
takes a more sober view of his discoveries than
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 59
Schliemann did, it has come to recognise their
value and to prosecute his work. The remark-
able result of these discoveries is, in the words
of Mr. D. G. Hogarth, to show that " man in
Hellas was more highly civilised before history
than when history begins to record his state ;
and there existed human society in the Hellenic
area, organised and productive, to a period so
remote that its origins were more distant from
the age of Pericles than that age is from our
own. We have probably to deal with a total
period of civilisation in the JEgean not much
shorter than in the Nile Valley." {Authority
afid ArchcBology, p. 230.) The general subject
cannot be pursued here, and we have to keep to
the narrower track opened up within the past
five years in the island of Crete by Mr. Arthur
J. Evans. His discoveries there establish (i ) the
fact of an indigenous culture, and (2) of an
active intercourse between Crete and Greece,
Egypt, Syria, and other countries centuries be-
fore the Phoenicians launched their craft upon
the midland sea and trafficked with Cypriote
and Cretan, or sailed beyond the Pillars of
Hercules. Full accounts of Mr. Evans's im-
portant work have for the most part been con-
tributed by him from time to time to the
memoirs of learned societies, but no statement
in popular form has yet appeared. What now
follows will therefore be in large degree an
abstract of his paper on " Primitive Pictographs
and a Prae- Phoenician Script from Crete and the
Peloponnese," published in the Journal of
Hellenic Studies^ vol. xiv.. Part H., 1894, pp.
l6o THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
270-372, and reprinted under the title Cretan
Pictographs, 1895.
During a visit to Greece in 1893, Mr. Evans
came across some small stones bearing engraved
symbols which appeared to be hieroglyphic in
character, approximating in form to Hittite, but
having features of their own. They were traced
to a Cretan source, and inquiry in Berlin elicited
the fact that the Imperial Museum there
possessed stones of corresponding character,
which also came from Crete. With this and
other corroborative evidence in hand, Mr.
Evans decided to follow up his inquiries on
Cretan soil, and began his investigations there
in the spring of 1894. He chose the eastern
part of the island as the more likely district for
discovery of prehistoric remains, because, up to
the dawn of history, it had been occupied by
the " Eteocretes," or primitive non-Hellenic
folk. At Praesos he obtained some stones in-
scribed with hieroglyphic or pictorial, and also
with linear, or quasi-alphabetic, characters, the
preservation of those objects through the vast
lapse of time since they were engraved being
largely due to their use as charms by the
Cretan women, who wear these " milk-stones,"
as they call them, during the period of child-
bearing. Where, owing to this superstition,
Mr, Evans was unable to secure the stones
themselves, he obtained impressions of the
characters on them. In exploring Goulds, the
ruins of which are larger than those of any
other prehistoric site, whether in Greece or
Italy, Mr. Evans acquired important additions
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS l6l
to his collection in the shape (i) of a cornelian
gem bearing the image of a rayed sun and a
Fig.
-Vase with incised Characters (Crete)
sprig of foliage; (2) of an ox in terra-cotta;
and (3) a clay
cup on which
were three graf-
fito {i.e. rudely
scribbled) char-
acters, two of
them being iden-
tical with the
Cypriote pa and
lo. A neigh-
bouring hamlet,
Prodromos Botzano, yielded a plain terra-cotta
vase of primitive aspect with incised hatching
L
Fig. 56.-
-Incised Characters on Cup
(Crete)
1 62 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
round its neck, and three more graffito symbols
of the same kind, one of which seemed to re-
present the double axe-head occurring among
the hieroglyphic forms reduced to a linear
AH;
SEMITIC
NF
Nl/
4^
CYPR A--
X
CVP LE
FCRN\ OF
VjiAPons
Si
(D
ARCHAIC
CK INSCR
CRETE
o
Q
CYPR
/90
s
CVPR
PE
n n
03
SEM HS
n,
n
^ s^
12 A
1
1/
iS
Y"/
OK AND 0>;ES head roLLOWED
BY TmE same Symbol on oppo-
. SiTE SIDES Of Trie Ph.^STOS wwoRL-
w
TABLE
PICTOCRAPHS AND LINEAR SYMBOLS
COMPARED.
CYPR ^ CYPKIOTe ARCH CK ■■ ARCHAIC
CREEK SE^\ = S£/VIITIC
M
i!!:iiiiiiiL
H
VASf HAHOvd
M
TABLE I
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 73
tite pendants and whorls ; and, as already
shown, in graffiti on pottery, or inscribed
blocks, and so forth, from all which sources
Mr. Evans has put together the thirty-two
characters shown in Table II, adding corre-
sponding characters from Cypriote and Egyptian
scripts. Table III gives examples of the char-
acters — doubtless syllabic — occurring in groups
of two or more.
The hieroglyphic-bearing signet stones have
been found solely in the region east of Knosos,
and the use of these characters appears not to
have passed beyond the island ; in fact it may
have been limited to the less advanced portions.
This tells against the direct descent of the
Cretan linear from the Cretan pictographic,
and, moreover, it is contended by Dr.
Tsountas that the pictographic system exercised
slight, if any, influence on the Hellenic portion
of Greece. But, in the absence of materials
which excavations now being prosecuted may
bring to light, any definite conclusions are
premature, and only the broadest general views
permissible. (The archaeological exploration of
Crete promises to yield materials of the first
importance for knowledge of the history of
civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean area,
and the appeal for funds which Mr. Evans and
Mr. Hogarth are making should have generous
response. Some details of this appeal are
printed at the end of this book.) Of the eighty-
two pictographic symbols sixteen approach to
Egyptian and sixteen to Hittite forms, but all
have, none the less, an independent character
iff
" m o
1=.
ill
t 5
o: >^ I
!1
, si.
/^^l/
77 '^
nil
P.
' Y-
i-
t '
■}'
- :
PO
Y
Y .
^ t
t
2
PA
S
z
y
. E
E
2
\D
a
J/4
' B
B5
2
X
X
r~i
Ml
■[X
AA
A^
" n
ffl
V
Sa
'■ >K
><
:*:'
/e
« ^
*/
• @
■' F
F ^
F '
, fv
,4 A^NA
To
•CJ
J
■' V
V
3
■0
&D
5/
'• H
H
]
•UJ
m
LU.
TABLE II
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 75
Stamping them as indigenous. Although the
coincidences are at times of such a character
as to suggest a real affinity, it must be remem-
T ABLE
CROUPS OF LINEAR SYMBOLS
\i/
-^^
Q
TABLE III
bered that the similarity in many of the objects
to be depicted explains the correspondences
between the picture-writing of different peoples.
"Some Cretan types present a surprising
176 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
analogy with the Asianic ; on the other hand,
many of the most recent of the Hittite
symbols are conspicuous by their absence.
The parallelism can best be explained by
supposing that both systems had grown up in
a more or less conterminous area out of still
more primitive pictographic elements. In the
early picture-writing of a region geographically
continuous there may well have been originally
many common elements, such as we find
among the American Indians at the present
day; and when, later, on the banks of the
Orontes and the highlands of Cappadocia on
the one side, or on the ALgesLU shores on the
other, a more formalised " hieroglyphic " script
began independently to develop itself out of
these simpler elements, what more natural than
that certain features common to both should
survive in each ? Later inter-communication
may have also contributed to preserve this
common element. But the symbolic script
with which we have here to deal is essentially
in situ. The Cretan system of picture-writing
is inseparable from the area dominated by the
Mycenaean form of culture. Geographically
speaking it belongs to Greece." {Jo. Helle7i.
Stud., p. 317.)
While, as remarked above, the hieroglyph-
bearing stones are found only in Crete, examples
of the linear character have been found at
Mycenae, Nauplia, and other prehistoric sites in
Greece and Egypt. Moreover, as already noted,
some of the signs have marked affinities with
Cypriote, Hittite, and Semitic.
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 77
Among the antiquities which make the Fayum
so renowned a district are the remains of two
cities; Kahun, which dates from the twelfth
dynasty, i.e. 2500 B.C., and Gurob, which is
some twelve centuries later, both sites yielding
evidence of Asian and ^gean settlers. When
digging there ten years ago Professor Flinders
Petrie discovered fragments of Mycenaean, or, as
he calls it, ^gean, pottery inscribed with char-
acters resembling, and in some cases identical
with, those found in Greece. Both the Professor
and Mr. Evans agree that the relics unearthed
at Kahun are as old as that city; while, speaking
of the signs known to be in use 1200 B.C., in
a place occupied by people of the ^gean and
Asia Minor, Turseni, Akhaians, Hittites, and
others, Professor Flinders Petrie remarks that
"it will require a very certain proof of the
supposed Arabian source of the Phcenician
alphabet before we can venture to deny that we
have here the origin of the Mediterranean
alphabets." {Ten Years' Digging in Egypt^
p. 134.) Conversely, scarabs of the twelfth
dynasty have been found in Crete, notable
among these being one in steatite with a spiral
ornament peculiar to that period.
Passing to excavations in the huge mound of
Tell-el-Hesy, in Palestine, made up of the ruins
of eleven different cities heaped up one above
another, we have the discovery, amongst re-
mains of the fourth city, dating about 1450
B.C., of potsherds inscribed with signs similar
to the ^-Egean.
While about twenty per cent, of the Cretan
M
178 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
hieroglyphs approach those of the Egyptian in
character, twenty out of the thirty-two hnear
signs there are practically identical with those
found in Egypt. Mr. Evans adds that " the
EGYPTIAN SCARABS, XIITH DYNASTY
EARLY CRETAN SEAL-STONES
Fig. 65
parallehsm with Cypriote forms is also remark
able, some fifteen agreeing with letters of the
Cypriote syllabary."
This syllabar]^, as its name implies, is found
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 79
in the island of Cyprus,
which, lying only sixty miles
from Asia Minor, might be
expected to yield many
traces of active intercourse
therewith from prehistoric
times. The affinity of its
ancient script with those of
Western Asia, which may
be looked upon as settled,
had, therefore, much to
commend it at the outset
of the inquiry. It stands
in nearest relation, possibly
as its direct descendant, to
the syllabary of the Hittites.
References to these people
come apace nowadays, and
their history has been pad-
ded out in portly volumes,
but, in truth, we know no
more about them than we
do about the Phoenicians
and Phrygians, which means
that we know very little in-
deed. Through the mists
of the past, with the help of
such light as is thrown by
tablets from Tell-el-Amarna,
sculptures from Karnak,
and by Hebrew and other
records, we have glimpses of
a great and powerful empire
which stretched from the
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l8o THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
Euphrates to the Euxine, pushing its borders to
the confines of Egypt, against which, on the one
hand, and Assyria on the other, it waged war
for a thousand years. In 1270 B.C. Rameses
III. had to face the onrush of the Hittites
and other confederated peoples, whom he de-
feated at Migdol. They '' had overrun Syria.
The islands and shores of the Mediterranean
gave forth their piratical hordes ; the sea was
covered with their hght galleys, and swept by
their strong oars." (Rawlinson's History of
A7icient Egypt, vol. ii. p. 271.) According to
Dr. Wright, the Hittites appear in history for
the first time " in the inscription of Sargon I.,
King of Agane, about 1900 B.C., and disappear
from history in the inscriptions of Sargon
717 B.C." {E??ipire of the Hittites, p. 122.)
Until some thirty years ago no monumental
remains had come to light concerning an empire
whose high place among ancient nations is
attested by the discovery of a treaty (the oldest
known example of its kind) with Egypt, in
which each recognised the other as a power
equal in rank to itself, and agreed to help it in
case of need. The first Hittite relic, a block
of basalt engraved with strange hieroglyphic
signs, was found by the traveller Burckhardt in
181 2 at Hamah, on the Orontes, but he could
not decipher the characters, and the matter was
forgotten till 1870, when the stone was re-
discovered, and similar relics brought to light.
But to this day the key of interpretation is
lacking, and scholars await the unearthing of
some bilingual monument which shall do for
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS l8l
the Hittite hieroglyphs what the Rosetta Stone
did for the Egyptian hieroglyphs andtheBehistun
rock for cuneiform writing. Till this, and more,
is effected, we remain in the realm of conjecture
about the mighty nation whose beardless soldiers
are depicted with daggers in their belts and
double-headed axes in their hands on the sculp-
tures of the Nile Valley. Minimising, however,
our knowledge of the Hittites to the uttermost,
their widely distributed relics evidence their
proficiency in certain departments of the arts.
They smelted silver and wrought in bronze,
^^^=Si
(^(£)^<^l^
QQ
Fig. 67. — Hittite Inscription at Hamah
they were skilful lapidaries and carvers in ivory,
and " the independent system of picture-writing
which they possessed offers an obvious source
from which the Asianic syllabary might have
been obtained." In the Hamah inscriptions
the characters are raised, and run in parallel
transverse lines.
"The lines of inscriptions and their boundaries
are clearly defined by raised bars about four
inches apart. The interstices between the bars
and characters have been cut away." The in-
scriptions are read from right to left and vice
versa in " boustrophedon " style {bous^ "an
l82 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
ox/' and strepho, "to turn," therefore, as an ox
ploughs), as in ancient Greek modes of writing.
Returning to Crete, we have to consider its
relation to the Mycenaean type of civilisation,
under which term is included civilisation in
pre-Homeric Greece and the yEgean Sea, cross-
ing thence to Hissarlik, the ancient Troy. The
spade has made havoc with some of our standard
"authorities," Grote refers to the city of
Mycenae only once in his well-known work,
and then incidentally speaks of it as the seat
of a legendary dynasty. Sir George Cox, in
his Mythology of the Aryan Nations, endorses
Professor Max Miiller's theory (to which, in
part, the veteran philologist still adheres), that
the siege of Troy " is a reflection of the daily
siege of the East by the solar powers that every
evening are robbed of their brightest treasures in
the West," and adds that this theory is " sup-
ported by a mass of evidence which probably
hereafter will be thought ludicrously excessive
in amount." The laugh is on the other side now.
Schliemann and his successors have broken into
the areas within Cyclopean walls whose massive
blocks aroused wonder long ages back, giving
birth to tales of giant hands that reared them.
They have disinterred relics proving an historic
element in old traditions, and a nucleus of fact
beneath the encrustation of fable over famous
names. Like the Empress Helena, who, in
searching for the True Cross, of course found
that for which she looked, Schliemann too
readily assumed that he had discovered the bones
of Agamemnon, and the cup from which Nestor
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 83
drank. But he brought to light the reHcs of a
culture, knowledge of which involves neither
more nor less than the re-writing of the history
of man in the Eastern Mediterranean, and, by
consequence, in Western Europe.
Dealing, as the limits of the subject compel,
only with
the traces
ofinscrip-
tions on
remains
from My-
cenae it-
self, the Fig. 68.— Signs on Vase-handle (Mycenae)
earliest
to be noted is a stone pestle with one incised
character which resembles a Cypriote sign. But
one sign does not make an alphabet, and hence
the satisfaction at the recent discovery of the
handle of a stone vase, apparently of a local
material, which has
four or five signs
engraved upon
and of the handle
of a clay amphora
from a chambered
tomb in the lower ^g. g^.^Signs on Amphora-handle
town of Mycenae (Mycenae)
with three char-
acters, while a tomb at Prousia, near Nauplia,
yielded a genuine Mycenaean vessel with three
ears, on each of which is graven a sign resem-
bling the Greek H. These may not suffice to
demonstrate the existence of a pre-Phoenician
las
ed ^ I [/ \
184 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
system of writing in Greece, but, taken in con-
junction with the numerous discoveries of in-
scribed signs in Crete, they go far in support
of it. What, then, are the facts as thus far
ascertained ?
There have been discovered in Crete a
number of objects bearing two sorts of writing,
one hieroglyphic or pictographic ; the other
Hnear and approaching the alphabetic. The
pictographic is the older of the two, dating
from the earlier part of the third millennium
before Christ. It was probably derived from
a primitive picture-writing by the non-Hel-
lenic inhabitants of the island, who were called
Eteocretans, or "true Cretans," by the Do-
rians, whose invasion dates, according to the
traditional Greek chronology, from about the
middle of the twelfth century B.C. These
" true Cretans " may not, however, be the
aboriginal inhabitants, although as to this, and
as to their language, we are in ignorance. The
recent discovery of an inscription in an un-
known language, written in archaic Greek
characters, among the ruins of Prcesos, the
chief Eteocretan settlement, warrants the in-
ference that the old script of the language had
been abandoned for the Greek alphabet. That
script, the use of which never passed outside
the island, obviously had no influence on
Mycenaean civilisation.
The linear system is syllabic ; perhaps, in
some degree, alphabetic. Its possible deriva-
tion from the hieroglyphic has been indicated,
but although it is a conventionalised form of
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 85
pictograph, Dr. Tsountas is positive in denying
its connection with the Eteocretan. He sug-
gests that its simplification took place in the
East, and among a people or peoples not
Greek. Thence it was carried into Greek
lands, spreading more in the islands, at least
in Crete, than in the Peloponnesus or other
portions of the mainland, where, as shown
above, the number of inscribed objects is
exceedingly small. The question is far from
ripe for solution, but Professor Flinders Petrie,
with whom lies a large share of honour in
contributing towards a settlement, courteously
permits me to quote the following from a letter
on the subject, dated 2nd September 1899:
"A great signary (not hieroglyphic, but geo-
metric in appearance, if not in origin) was in use
all over the Mediterranean 5000 B.C. It is
actually found in Egypt at that period, and
was split in two. Western and Eastern, by the
cross flux of hieroglyphic systems in Egypt and
among the Hittites. This linear signary was
developed variously, but retained much in
common in different countries. It was first
systematised by the numerical values assigned
to it by Phoenician traders, w^ho carried it into
Greece, whereby the Greek signary was de-
limited into an alphabet. But the fuller form
of the signary survived in Karia with thirty-six
signs, and seven more in Iberia, thus giving
values to forty-three. This connection of the
Iberian with the Karian is striking ; so is that
of the Egyptian with the West rather than with
the East. Signs found in Egypt have thirteen
1 86 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
in common with the early Arabian, fifteen in
common with Phoenician, and thirty-three in
common with Karian and Kelt-Iberian. This
stamps the Egyptian signary of the twelfth and
eighteenth dynasties as closely linked with the
other Mediterranean systems." In an impor-
tant paper read at the meeting of the British
Association, 1899, Professor Flinders Petrie
remarks : " We stand therefore now in an en-
tirely new position as to the sources of the
alphabet, and we see them to be about thrice
as old as had been supposed. That the signs
were used for written communications of spelled-
out words in the early stages, or as an alphabet,
is far from probable. It was a body of signs,
with more or less generally understood mean-
ings ; and the change of attributing a single
letter value to each, and only using signs for
sounds to be built into words, is apparently a
relatively late outcome of the systematising due
to Phoenician commerce." (^Jo. A?ifhrop. Inst.,
Aug.-Nov., 1899, p. 205.)
Connecting the results of explorations in
Asia Minor, Egypt, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes,
Thera, Melos, and other islands of the Eastern
Mediterranean with those in the Peloponnesus,
the existence of a pre-Phoenician civilisation, of
which Mycenge may be conveniently regarded
as the centre, appears to be demonstrated.
That civilisation, so far as its connection
with the prehistoric stages of man's develop-
ment goes, falls in, like aught else in this wide
and ancient world, with the doctrine of con-
tinuity, but for purposes of time-reckoning
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 87
dates at latest far back in the third millennium
before our era. Mycenfean vases have been found
in Egypt, and Egyptian scarabs in IMycengean
deposits. They prove an intimate intercourse
between the two countries two thousand five
hundred years before Christ. And there was
intercourse farther afield. The imitations of
Babylonian cylinders, the sculptured palms and
lions, the figures of Astarte and her doves,
show that fifteen hundred years before the date
ascribed to the Homeric poems Assyria and
Greece had come into contact. But the
examples of Oriental art which had found their
way to the soil of Argolis remained more or less
exotic, the independent features of ^lycensean
art being retained unaltered. Now the cumu-
lative effect of this evidence, which is only
baldly summarised here, is to shatter to pieces
current theories as to the Phoenician origin of
European civilisation, and, consequently, what
mainly concerns us here, of the Phoenician
origin of the European alphabets through the
Egyptian hieratic. For that evidence shows
that the Mycencean civilisation is (i) earlier in
time, and (2) indigenous in character.
(i) The evidence as to priority can be sum-
marily stated. Civilisation in the ^gean and
on the Greek mainland dates from beyond 3000
B.C., and reached its meridian between the six-
teenth and the twelfth centuries of that era.
Almost all that we know about the Phoenicians
is at second-hand, since, if they ever had a
literature or native chronicles, these have not
survived. Piecing together classical tradition
1 88 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
and references in Egyptian and Hebrew records,
we gather that for some three centuries onwards
from 1600 B.C. Phoenicia was a dependency of
the Pharaohs. There was a Tyrian quarter at
Memphis 1250 B.C. Hiram appears to have
refounded Tyre 1028 B.C., from which time its
commercial importance dates; while the re-
founding of its future great rival Carthage is
assigned to the early years of the eighth century
B.C. The decay of the Mycenoean civilisation,
which followed as one of the many results of
the Dorian invasion in the twelfth century B.C.,
gave the Phoenicians their chance. They over-
ran the y^gean, and remained the dominant
power in the Mediterranean until the Greeks,
reviving their ancient traditions, expelled the
Phoenicians from their waters, and broke their
supremacy when Tyre was sacked by Alexander
the Great, 332 B.C. Between their rise and
fall, their commercial pre-eminence enabled
them to impose upon the Greeks the alphabet
which was the vehicle of preservation of the
intellectual wealth of the Hellenes, and of all
literature that followed theirs. What were the
probable sources of that alphabet will be con-
sidered presently.
(2) After allowing full play for Asian and
Egyptian influences, the fact abides that there
was a well - developed native Mycencean art.
The decoration of the pottery is non-Oriental
and non-Egyptian ; the seaweeds and marine
creatures depicted are home-products of the
island world of Greece ; and where sacred trees
and pillars appear, we have no Semitic element,
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 89
but the outcome, as Mr. Evans puts it, of a
"religious stage widely represented on primitive
European soil, and nowhere more persistent
than in the West." But if there were stepping-
stones between Argolis and Syria in the islands
that lay between, there was continuous passage
on the western side, making IMycen^ a link
between East and West. The breaks formerly
assumed between the Old and the New Stone
Ages of prehistoric Europe have been filled up
by the accumulation of evidence as to man's
continuous tenure of that continent since his
primitive ancestors crossed thither by now
vanished land-routes from Northern Africa.
In like manner the Mirage Orientak, as
M. Salomon Reinach happily terms it, of a
metal-introducing people from the East, who,
in successive racial waves, swept the older
settlers before them into the remotest corners
of the north-west, has vanished. When once
peopled, Europe, like Asia and America, ran
on independent lines of development, which,
however, were not isolated from connecting lines
approaching from the East. The striking facts
of the use of common trade-signs along both
shores of the Mediterranean, and of the existence
of remains of MyceUcXan monuments in Sardinia,
are in keeping with other facts, showing how
close was the contact between one part of Europe
and another centuries before the Phcenicians
had left the shores of the Persian Gulf for the
Syrian seaboard. They prepare us for accept-
ance of the new theory of " an yf^gean culture
rising in the midst of a vast province extending
IQO THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
from Switzerland and Northern Italy through
the Danubian basin and the Balkan peninsula,
and continued through a large part of Anatolia,
till it finally reaches Cyprus." (Evans, Address
Brit. Assoc; Nature^ ist Oct. 1896, p. 529.)
They prepare us for the fact that in the Bronze
Age, if Scandinavia and its borderlands were
the source of amber, the supply of gold for
Northern and Central Europe was drawn not
from the Ural, but from Ireland.
The centre whence this " ^gean " culture
is held to have been diffused is denoted by
its name. That name, however, covers the
Eastern Mediterranean region, and the question
arises whether or not some precise place in
that area can be indicated as the cradleland.
" Hellas," says Herodotus, "was formerly called
Pelasgix" (ii. 56), and this pre-Hellenic Greece
was inhabited by Barbarians or Pelasgians, as
they are, with equal vagueness, called. There
were "Pelasgians" on the mainland and the
islands ; "the whole of Peloponnesus took the
name of Pelasgia; the kings of Tiryns were
Pelasgians, and/Eschylus calls Argos a Pelasgian
city; Pausanias (viii. 4, 6) says that the
Arcadians spoke of Pelasgus as the first man
who lived in that country, wherefore, in his
reign, it was called Pelasgia; an old wall at
Athens was attributed to the Pelasgians, and
the people of Attica had from all time been so
called. Lesbos also was called Pelasgia, and
Homer knew of Pelasgians in the Troad.
Their settlements are further traced to Egypt,
to Rhodes, Cyprus, Epirus — where Dodona
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS I9I
was their ancient shrine — and, lastly, to various
parts of Italy." (Keane's Man Fast and
Present^ p. 505.) Herodotus has little to say
in favour of the Barbarians (which he uses as a
descriptive and not a contemptuous term, the
name being given by Greeks to all foreigners
whose language was not Greek) ; he speaks
of them as rude, of uncouth speech, and
worshippers of repellent deities. Wachsmuth,
in his Historical Autiqiiities of the Greeks^
published over sixty years ago, says that
" numerous traditionary accounts, of undoubted
authenticity, describe them as a brave, moral,
and honourable people, which was less a distinct
stock and tribe than a race united by a
resemblance in manners and the forms of life."
Professor Keane fitly calls these " remarkable
words," in view of the recent discoveries in pre-
historic Greece, which warrant us in ascribing
to the Pelasgians the development of culture
in the ^gean Sea. But in what island, or on
what part of the mainland? The important
character of the finds at Mycenae directs quest
thither at the start. The debris of that city,
and of her elder-sister city, Tiryns, have yielded
varied relics of an ancient culture, from gold-
masked skeletons in vaulted tombs to gorgeously
decorated palaces and Cylopean ruins of walls
and fortresses. But there are traditions that
these Argolic cities are of later date than
Homer's "great city of Knossos" in Crete,
wherein " Minos, when he was nine years old,
began to rule, he who held converse with the
great Zeus, and was the father of my father.
192 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
even of Deucalion, high of heart," traditions
pointing to the existence of an important Cretan
kingdom which flourished before Agamemnon
ruled in Mycenae.
Water is the birthplace of civilisation, as of
life itself, and the original home of the /Egean
or Mycenaean civilisation is probably to be found
in the island of Crete. It is crammed with
remains of pre-Hellenic culture. It is a big
stepping-stone from Greece to Asia Minor,
Karpathos and Rhodes lying between. It is
in the line of communication with Cyprus,
Syria, and Egypt on the East, and with Sicily
and the coastlines of the Western Mediterranean.
The earliest Greek tradition looks back to
Crete " as the home of divinely inspired legisla-
tion and the first centre of maritime dominion."
And, what is of the highest moment to remem-
ber, so far as the origin of the art of navigation
in ^gean waters goes, there can be no question
between the old claims on behalf of the
Phoenicians and the present claims on behalf
of Crete. The Syrian seaboard is harbourless
and unsheltered ; the men who first braved
the "unvintaged" "wine dark" waters (how
fine are all the Homeric sea-words) were
island-dwellers, shooting forth from snug creek
and harbour on quick and sudden enterprise,
and growing bolder and bolder as they sailed by
the rising and setting of the stars and the
recurring moon. " The early sea-trade of the
inhabitants of the island world of the .-^^gean
gave them a start over their neighbours, and
produced a higher form of culture, which was
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 93
destined to react on that of a vast European
zone, nay, even upon that of the older
civiHsations of Egypt and Asia." (Evans,
Address, B. Assoc, p. 530.) For the diffusion
of culture throughout the ^Egean was followed
by expeditions to the East. While Cyprus
yielded the metal to which it has given
its name, the gold of Asia Minor was
poured into the lap of the pre-Hellenes, and
moulded into forms of beauty through which
their own artistic skill challenged comparison
with that of the Oriental. In his comment on
the source of the Mycenaean civilisation Mr.
Frazer aptly remarks that "the existence at
this early date of a great maritime power in
Crete, which by its central position between
Greece and the empires of the East was well
fitted to receive and amalgamate the charac-
teristics of both, is just what is needed to
explain the rise and wide diffusion of a type of
civilisation like the Mycenaean, in which Oriental
influences seem to be assimilated and trans-
muted by a vigorous and independent nationality
endowed with a keen sense of its own for art.
The spade will probably one day decide the
question of priority between Argolis and Crete,
but in the meantime the probability appears
to be that the Mycensean civilisation rose in
Crete and spread from it as a centre, and that it
was not until the Cretan power was on the wane
that the palmy days of Tiryns and Mycenae
began." {Commentary on Pausanias, vol. iii.
p. 151.) The Mycenaean civilisation perished
in a great catastrophe. Somewhere near the
N
t94 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
middle of the twelfth century B.C. the Dorian
invaders in their southward march reached
^he walls of Tiryns and Mycenae, and sacked
and gave those cities to the flames. Then
began for Greece "the long dark ages, the
mediaeval epoch, out of which she emerges
■only in the Homeric Renaissance." The
ilower of the survivors of that dread time
sought a new home east of the ^^gean on
the isles and shores of Ionia. There these
exiles from Argolis laid the foundation of a
culture whose influence will abide while the
world stands, because Ionia remains the father-
land of all who hold dear what man has
reached in art and literature, in science and
philosophy.
The fall of Mycenae gave Phoenicia her oppor-
tunity, and she was quick to seize it in estab-
lishing depots throughout the y^'gean, and in
securing the overlordship of the Mediterranean.
But through her lack of political unity, and her
dependence on mercenary aid when troubles
came, finally she succumbed to the strong arm
of the reinvigorated Greek. Between their
rise and decline the Phoenicians had put the
alphabet into, practically, its present form, and
secured its adoption by the Greeks. But if
they did not derive it from the Egyptian
hieratic, whence came it ?
No definite answer is forthcoming, and
perhaps never will be. Canon Rawlinson is
not alone in thinking that it will probably
never be settled whether the Phcenician char-
acters are modifications of the Egyptian or the
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 95
Hittite or of Cypriote, or mere abbreviated
forms of a picture-writing peculiar to the
Phoenicians. That opinion was expressed be-
fore the discovery of the Cretan pictographs
and linear signs, and these have not settled the
question. The Phoenicians came under various
influences, and their adaptive character readily
took the impress of their surroundings. Prob-
ably they had a long history before they appear
in Syria. As Semites, they were presumably
familiar with cuneiform. The Tyrian quarter at
Memphis was one of many settlements where the
Egyptian characters would be in use, or, at
least, familiar. And when the Phoenicians came
into the ^gean they found an ancient script
whereby intercourse was facilitated along the
Mediterranean, a script of which so pliant a
people, eager for trade, would avail themselves.
In view of all these probabilities, Mr. Evans
remarks that it is at least worth while weighing
'' the possibility that the rudiments of the
Phoenician writing may after all have come in
part at least from the ALgea.n side. The more
the relics of Mycenaean culture are revealed to
us, the more we see how far ahead of their
neighbours on the Canaanite coasts was the
^gean population in arts and civilisation."
The spread of their commerce led them to seek
plantations in the Nile Valley and the Mediter-
ranean outlets of the Arabian and Red Sea
trade. The position was the reverse of that
which meets our eye at a later date. It was
not Sidon that was then planting mercantile
settlements on the coasts and islands of Greece."
196 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
{Jo. Helleii. stud., p. 368.) Whether, per
contra, a Semitic element had been intro-
duced into the yEgean is uncertain, but could
this be proved, the presence of similarities
between the respective scripts would have easy
explanation. Putting together, however, what
is no longer conjectural, it would seem that the
Phoenician alphabet was a compound from
various sources, the selection and modification
of the several characters being ruled by con-
venience, and that, primarily and essentially,
commercial. Like all business people immersed
in many transactions, their method was brevity,
and so they aimed as near '^ shorthand " as they
could. They got rid of surplus signs, of the
lumber of determinatives and the like, and
invented an alphabet which if it was not perfect
(as no alphabet can be, because the letters are
not revised from time to time to represent
changes in sound), was of such signal value as
to have been accepted by the civilised world of
the past, and to have secured, with but slight
modifications, a permanence assured to no other
invention of the human race. Therefore, the
debt that we owe these old traders is in
nowise lessened because the current theory of
derivation of our alphabet is doubted. This
theory as to the nature of the service rendered
by the Phoenicians has corroboration in an
ancient Cretan tradition recorded by Diodoros,
a contemporary of Julius Ccesar and Augustus, to
which Air. Evans makes reference in the reprint
of his essay. According to that tradition, the
Phoenicians had not invented written characters,
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 1 97
but had simply "changed their shapes." In
other words, they had not done more than
improve on an existing system, which is pre-
cisely what recent evidence goes to show. " We
may infer from the Cretan contention recorded
by Diodoros that the Cretans claimed to have
been in possession of a system of writing before
the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet.
The present discovery on Cretan soil both of a
pictographic and a linear script dating from
times anterior to any known Phoenician contact
thus affords an interesting corroboration of this
little regarded record of an ancient writer."
{Cretan Fictographs^ p. 372.)
CHAPTER X
GREEK PAPYRI
The Greeks succeeded to the sovereignty of
the sea after they had driven the Phoenicians
from the ^gean. They were skilful shipbuilders
and navigators, and their maritime enterprise,
in which, as has been shown, they preceded the
Phoenicians, took a new lease of life from the
eighth century B.C. Their factories and colonies
were planted from east to west, from Odessa to
Marseilles, where, as their farthermost point,
we find them settled 600 B.C. The assistance
given by lonians and Carians to Psammetichus,
the first king of the twenty-sixth dynasty (666
B.C.) in his war with the Assyrians was rewarded
by the assignment of permanent settlements in
Egypt, and in the reign of his son, Necho II.,
the cities of Sais and Naucratis (about both of
which Herodotus has much to say, ii. 97, 135,
169, 178, &c.) was full of Greek colonists, to
whose commercial and intellectual activity the
then prosperous state of Egypt was mainly due.
The footing which they obtained there was
secured when, three hundred years later,
Alexander the Great marked his conquest
in the founding of the city which bears his
193
GREEK PAPYRI I 99
name. It is well to keep these facts in mind,
because in our assessment of the debt of the
civilised world to Greece we are apt to forget
that it was not wholly intellectual, but also
social and industrial. And these facts have
bearing on our immediate subject in explaining
the spread of the Greek alphabet, or, more
precisely, the Western or Chalcidian form of
it, whence the Latin, and through it the
alphabets of Europe and America, are derived.
Although the name was limited to the districts
in the south of Italy, in the larger sense of the
term Graecia Major corresponds to Greater
Britain. As with the area of our home islands
compared with that of our colonies, so was it
with Hellas and her expansion along the sea
whose waters laved the coasts of the civilised
world. And the spread of the English language
and the English alphabet over half the civilised
globe may be compared with " the diffusion of
Hellenic culture and Hellenic scripts throughout
the Mediterranean region, originating in the pre-
Christian centuries various derived alphabets —
Iberian, Gaulish, Etruscan, Latin, and Runic,
followed at a later time by the Maeso-Gothic,
Albanian, &:c." (Taylor, ii. 125.)
Palceography, or the decipherment of docu-
ments, and Epigraphy, or the decipherment of
inscriptions, have been indispensable keys to the
history of the alphabet. But the materials with
which each has to deal would demand a volume,
and, moreover, reference to them here has
warrant only in their immediate bearings on the
development and diffusion of alphabets. But, as
200 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
with the Papyrus Prisse and the Book of the
Deadj there is a deep interest attaching to
some of the venerable records. They are, in
the modern phrase, and in the best sense of it,
"human documents." Such are the Greek
papyri, the oldest-known specimens of which
are found in Egypt, and have a range of a
thousand years, i.e. from the third century B.C.
to the seventh century a.d., so that, as Mr.
Kenyon remarks in his monograph on the
subject, " we may fairly say that we know how
men wrote in the days of Aristotle and
Menander, but we have not yet got back
to Pindar and ^schylus, much less to Homer
or (if a less contentious name be preferred)
Hesiod." The use of papyrus as a writing
material stretches back in Egypt to a remote
antiquity ; but we cannot be certain that it was
used by the Greeks before the early part of the
fifth century B.C., while "with the Arab con-
quest of Egypt (640 A.D.) the practice of Greek
writing on papyrus received its death-blow."
By far the larger number of documents thus far
discovered are non-literary, dealing with official
and commercial matters, as tax-collectors'
receipts (although many of these are scratched
on potsherds, or ostnica, literally "oyster shells,"
whence ostracize, the inscribing of the name of
a person obnoxious to the state on a shell),
acknowledgments of repayment of dowry after
divorce, wills, reports of public physicians on
autopsy, house-keeping bills, surety deeds,
registration of title to inheritance, wedding and
dinner invitations, of which last here is an
I
GREEK PAPYRI 20I
example eighteen hundred years old : " Chaeron
requests your company at dinner at the table of
Lord Serapis in the Serap^eum to-morrow, the
15th, at 9 o'clock" {i.e. about 3 p.m.). Then
there are domestic letters, one, touching human
hearts across the centuries, from a father to his
son: "Tell me anything I can do for you.
Good-bye, my boy ; " and another crudely
written, and with faulty spelling and grammar,
from a boy to his father. "Theon to his father
Theon, greeting: It was a fine thing of you
not to take me with you to Alexandria. I won't
write a letter or speak to you, or say good-bye to
you, and if you go to Alexandria I won't take
your hand, nor ever greet you again. That is
what will happen if you won't take me. . . .
Send me a lyre, I implore you ; if you don't,
I won't eat, I won't drink. There, now ! "
The first discovery of Greek papyri was made
at Herculaneum in 1752. They consist of
above eighteen hundred charred rolls, which
were enclosed in a wooden cabinet, and doubt-
less formed a portion of the library of one
Lucius Piso Ceesonius, in the ruins of whose
villa they were found. The condition of the
papyri made the unrolling and decipherment of
them a very tedious operation, and the work is
not even yet completed. " They are written in
small uncial letters, and possess little beyond
palaeographic value, comprising worthless
treatises on physics, music, rhetoric, and
kindred subjects by Philodemus and other
third-rate philosophers of the Epicurean school"
A quarter of a century later some roils of
202 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
papyrus were found in Egypt, probably in the
Fayum. Of these only one, containing a list
of peasants employed in the corvee, survived
destruction by the natives, and it was not till
1820 that the discovery of a number of rolls on
the site of the Serapeum at Memphis supplied
the key to knowledge of Greek writing of the
second century B.C. Since then, at varying
intervals, the finds have increased in number
and importance. The earliest known examples,
dating from the third century B.C., were dis-
covered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1889 in
a number of mummy cases at Gurob. Most of
these papyri were non-literary — wills, petitions,
and such-like documents — but twovaluablerelics
came to light in fragments of Plato's Phcedo
and the lost Antiope of Euripides. Then
followed the discovery of another lost work,
Aristotle's 'AO-qvaicov UoXireLa; of the Mimes
of Herodas — an almost unknown writer of the
Alexandrian age — part of another oration of
Hyperides ; along medical treatise, and fragments
of Homer, Demosthenes, and Isocrates. The
Mimes, two thousand years old, are as young as
yesterday. "Though," Mr. Whibley remarks in a
charming paper upon these recovered treasures,
"they have survived the searching test of time,
they have been unseen of mortal eyes for count-
less centuries. The emotions which Herodas
delineates are not Greek, but human, and no
preliminary cramming in archaeology is neces-
sary for their appreciation. As the world was
never young, so it will never grow old. The
archaeologist devotes years of research to com-
GREEK PAPYRI 203
piling a picture of Greek life, and the result is
Charides — a cold and unrelieved mass of ' local
colour.' There is no proportion, no atmosphere,
no background ; all is false save the details, and
they merely overload the canvas. Herodas
presents not a picture, but an impression, and
one mime reveals more of life as it was lived
two thousand years ago, than the complete
works of Becker, Ebers, and the archaeologists."
(^Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1891, p. 748.)
Here is one scene by which Mr. Whibley justifies
his appreciation. The dramatis personce, are
Metriche, a grass-widow; Threissa, her maid;
and Gyllis, an old lady.
Metriche. Threissa, there is a knock at the door ; go
and see if it is a visitor from the country.
Threissa. Please push the door. Who are you that
are afraid to come in ?
Gyllis. All right, you see, I am coming in.
Threissa. What name shall I say ?
Gyllis. Gyllis, the mother of Philainis. Go indoors,
and announce me to Metriche.
Threissa. A caller, ma'am.
Metriche. What, Gyllis, dear old Gyllis ! Turn the
chair round a little, girl. What fate induced you to
come and see me, Gyllis? An angel's visit, indeed!
Why, I believe it's five months since any one dreamt of
your knocking at my door.
Gyllis. I live such a long way off, and the mud in the
lane is up to your knees. I am ever anxious to come,
for old age is heavy upon me, and the shadow of death is
at my side.
Metriche. Cheer up ! don't malign Father Time ; old
age is wont to lay his hand on others too.
Gyllis. Joke away ; though young women can find
something better to do than that. But, my dear girl,
what a long time you've been a widow. It's ten months
since Mandris was despatched to Egypt, and he hasn't
204 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
sent you a single line ; doubtless he has forgotten you,
and is drinking at a new spring ; for in Egypt you may
find all things that are or ever were — wealth, athletics,
power, fine weather, glory, goddesses, philosophers,
gold, handsome youths, the shrine of the god and god-
dess, the most excellent king, the finest museum in the
world, wine, all the good things you can desire, and
women, by Persephone, countless as the stones and
beautiful as the goddesses that appealed to Paris.
Metriche protests, and Gyllis, suggesting that
Mandris is dead, reveals the purpose of her
visit.
Now listen to the news T have brought you after this
long time. You know Gyllus, the son of Matachene,
who was such a famous athlete at school, got a couple of
blues at his university, and is now amateur champion
bruiser? Then he is so rich, and he leads the quietest
life ; see, here is his signet-ring. Well, he saw you the
other day in the street, and was smitten to the heart.
And, my dear girl, he never leaves my house day or
night, but bemoans his fate, and calls upon your name ;
he is positively dying of love.
Metriche becomes righteously indignant when
Gyllis suggests that she return this love.
By the fates, Gyllis, your white hairs blunt your reason.
There is no cause yet to deplore the fate of Mandris.
By Demeter, I shouldn't like to have heard this from
another woman's lips. And you, my dear, never come
to my house with such proposals again. For none may
make mock of Mandris. . . . But, if what the world
says be true, I needn't speak to Gyllis like this. Thre-
issa, let us have some refreshments ; bring the decanter
and some water, and give the lady something to drink.
Now, Gyllis, drink, and show that you aren't angry.
And so with delightful interchange of civili-
ties the quarrel is brought to an end.
GREEK PAPYRI 205
Passing by other discoveries, some of these
including fragments of a play by Menander, of
whose hundred comedies none are perfect, we
come to the thousands of Greek papyri found
in 1896-97 by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt on
the site of the ancient Oxyrhynchus, the capital
of a nome of Middle Egypt. The full list of
these relics has not yet been published, and it
will take some years to decipher them all ; but
among the literary portion are fragments of
works known and unknown. Among the latter
is a papyrus of the second century, containing
a collection of Logia, or Sayi?igs, of Jesus
Christ, some of which are familiar, whilst others
are wholly new. The following translation of
these, made by the Rev. A. C. Headlam, is
based on the text as provisionally settled by
Professors Lock and Sanday.
1. (Jesus saith, Cast out first the beam out of thine own
eye), and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote in thy
brother's eye.
2. Jesus saith, Except ye fast to the world, ye shall
not find the kingdom of God ; and unless ye keep the
true Sabbath, ye shall not see the Father.
3. 4. Jesus saith, I stood in the midst of the world, and
in my flesh I was seen of them, and I found all men
drunken, not one found I thirsty among them ; and
my soul is weary for the sons of men, for they are blind
in their heart, and see (not, poor and know not) their
poverty.
5. Jesus saith, Wherever there be (two, they are not
without) God, and if anywhere there be one, I am with
him ; raise the stone and there thou shalt find me ; cleave
the wood, and there am I.
6. Jesus saith, A prophet is not received in his own
country, nor doth a physician heal his neighbours.
7. Jesus saith, A city built on the summit of a lofty
2o6 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
mountain, and firmly established, cannot fall nor be
hidden.
8. Jesus saith, Thou hearest with (one ear), but the
other hast thou closed.
Discoveries of this sort bring with them temp-
tation to dwell on their significance, but that
must be resisted. There is also temptation to
refer to other materials bearing on the history
of the Greek alphabet — notably to the inscrip-
tions on the stupendous statue at Abu Simbel,
near the second cataract of the Nile — the mere
abstract of which would fill this little volume.
But the excerpts — varied enough — already given
will suffice to indicate what wealth of literature
for our knowledge of the past these venerable
relics yield, ^nd how poor beyond redemption
would the world be if shorn of those records of
human thought and feeling, of those grave and
gay pictures of hfe, so closely resembling our
own, whereby, too, we learn how superficial
have been the changes in human nature through-
out the ages of man's tenancy of the earth.
The Diffusion of the "Phcenician"
Alphabet
In the remaining pages the course of the
history of the Phoenician alphabet, as we may
for convenience still call it, must now be out-
lined, and for this purpose the following table,
an abstract of that given in Canon Isaac
Taylor's History of the Alphabet (i. 8i), is a
convenient guide.
The several alphabets, it will be seen, are
GREEK PAPYRI 207
grouped under three principal heads : (a)
Aramean, whence most of the alphabets of
Western Asia are derived; (^) Sab^an, the
source of the alphabets of India; and (c)
Hebrew.
1
S ■
<
Syriac.
Mongolian
Arabic.
Pehlevi.
Armenian.
Georgian.
r EtHIOPIC
Amharic.
Burmese.
^.
Siamese.
Javanese.
Singalese.
il
<
^ Corean.
Tibetan.
i\
m"
V
Kashmiri.
S.
<
Z
<
Gujarati.
Marathi.
1— 1
Bengali.
Malayan.
'■ Tamil.
Telugu.
1
,-j
w
I— 1
Canarese.
Greek.
Latin.
Russian.
Coptic.
Hellenic, the source of the alphabets of
Europe.
{a) Aramean, so called from "Aram," the
hilly district of Mesopotamia, became, from
2o8 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
the seventh century B.C., the commercial script
of Asia, Aram lying in the line of trade between
Egypt and Babylonia. Later on that script was
used for official purposes at the Babylonian court,
and "ultimately broke up into a number of
national alphabets, for which, owing to religious
causes, a separate existence became possible.
The later alphabets — Parsi, Hebrew, Syriac,
Mongolian, and Arabic — were at first local
varieties of the Aramean. Owing to accidental
circumstances they became the sacred scripts
of the five great faiths of Asia — Zoroastrianism,
Judaism, Christianity, Northern Buddhism,
and Islam. Hence the descendants of the
Aramean alphabet occupy a space on the
map second only to that filled by the Latin
alphabet itself." (Taylor, i. 249.) They are,
as indicated in the table: (i) the Hebrew,
in whose modern square characters copies of
the Scriptures in that language are printed,
and the rolls of the Law inscribed ; (2) the
Syriac^ once an important script of Christian
literature, but now only in use among some
obscure sects ; (3) the Mongolian, which has a
curious history, narrated at length in Canon
Taylor's volumes (i. pp. 297-312). It is
derived from the Syriac, which was carried by
Nestorian missionaries throughout Asia. Con-
demned by the Council of Ephesus in 431 a.d.
for certain heresies concerning the dual nature
of Christ, these Nestorians fled to Persia, and
thence travelling eastward, preached their gospel
with such success that the alphabet in which it
was written became the dominant script until
GREEK PAPYRI 209
its supersession by Arabic on the spread of
Alohammedanism. (4) The history of Arabic^
which is more nearly allied to Syriac than to
any other member of the Aramean group,
exhibits the aggressive spirit of the Prophet,
whose scriptures are transcribed in its beautiful
flowing characters. It has exterminated its
fellow - Semitic scripts, "expelled the Greek
alphabet from Asia Minor, Thrace, Syria, and
Egypt, and the Latin alphabet from Northern
Africa, and is now used over regions inhabited
by more than one hundred millions of the
human race." The transactions of the East
are recorded in the alphabet of the Koran,
so that it would seem, in the world's history,
that if " trade follows the flag," the alphabet
follows religion.
The so-called "Arabic" numerals are pro-
bably of Indian origin, having been brought
by Arab traders from the East and introduced
by them into Spain in the Middle Ages, whence
they spread over Europe, coming into use in
England perhaps about the eleventh century.
But whether India invented them, or borrowed
them from Greek or other traders from the
West, is unknown. Counting with the fingers,
the most primitive mode of reckoning, and
recording by strokes, a method still in vogue,
have their limits, and hence (to say nothing of
the use of pebbles and beans, and of the
abacus) the invention of written signs for the
higher numbers ; or the adoption of the letters
of the alphabet in their order as number-
signs, the numerical value increasing with each
o
210 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
successive letter; or the use of the initial letter
of the word itself for the number. Examples
of special symbols for tens, hundreds, and so
forth are supphed by Egyptian and Assyrian
records, as shown in the following figures : —
1=1 111111111 = 9 n = io niiiii = i5 nn = 20
C = IOO 1 = 1000 1=10,000
II
ccnnniiii = 4434
EGYl'TIAN NUMERATION
y=i<=io f> — 100 <|>-(ioxioo)=iooo
mKi-i;!i-«) The Sab^an (from " Sheba ") or Himya-
The Arabic Ciphers.
14th cent. i2thc,
Gobar.
(Arab.)
Indian.
loth c. I 5th c,
Letters of the
Indo-Bactrian
Alphabet.
2nd and ist cent.
B.C.
(Su;^gested
prototypes.)
1
I
\
z
^
^
5
^
^
f
^
^
y
^
y
^
^
<^
7
7
1
g
^
^
S
3
i?
A
Xt
I
s
7
c
en
K
h
?
n --4
ritic (from Himyar, the eponymous hero of the
GREEK PAPYRI 213
Himyarites) group is classed among South
Semitic alphabets. The early alphabet of
Abyssinia, called Ethiopic or Amharic, is de-
rived from it, and, wherein lies its main import-
ance, also the alphabets of India, the number
of which, comprising more than half of the
alphabets now in use, would, in detailed treat-
ment, "demand a space wholly disproportionate
to any interest which they might possess save to
an extremely limited band of specialists." That
is Canon Taylor's excuse for passing them over
with brevity, and those who care to pursue a
subject yielding to few in dryness will find it
summarised in the tenth chapter of his work.
For the present purpose, the list of alphabets
set down in the table will suffice.
(c) The Hellenic. — It was a happy chance
that, in the westward course of the Phoenician
alphabet, the Greeks were the first to receive it.
For while the various scripts of Asia and the
Malayan Archipelago, which are derived from
that alphabet, have retained, in the main, its
consonantal character, leaving the vowels to be
only partially indicated, the Greeks, with master-
touch, shaped it to relative perfection in adding
separate letters to represent the vowels, so that
there might be a visible sign for every audible
sound of the human voice. Besides this, they
put some of the superfluous gutturals and
sibilants to new uses, simplified other char-
acters, and ultimately transposed the Semitic
mode of writing from right to left by writing
from left to right. These, and other changes
both in the Greek and its derived alphabets,
214 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
were made slowly and almost imperceptibly, " de-
scent with modification," to apply the Darwinian
phrase concerning plants and animals to the
scripts of the world, being as much a feature
in their history as in that of organisms generally.
To complete the parallel, when a certain stage
of adaptation is reached, there is, as e.g. in
the case of our own alphabet, mainly through
the invention of printing, arrest of development.
Nature may aim at perfection, but is content
with adjustment, and the works of man abide
only as they are, in Stoic maxim, "according to
nature."
The alphabets derived from the Hellenic are
(i) Greek, (2) Russia?!, (3) Coptic, (4) Latin.
(i) Greek. — To the ancient Greek Hellas
meant no defined country, but simply the
abode of the Hellenes, whether in Smyrna,
Syracuse, Athens, or wherever else they might
be found. The mountainous character of
Greece explains its division into a crowd of
petty states, many of which were no bigger
than a modern township. This accorded with
Aristotle's view that the area of the state should
not be wider than an orator's voice would carry.
The physical separation of the peoples explains
that political disunion which was the curse of
the country from first to last, and accounts for
the forty local alphabets which made for discord.
But the federation at the time of the Persian
invasion, when the victories of Marathon and
Salamis fostered conceptions of a common
fatherland, was followed by the rise of Athens,
and her intellectual supremacy determined that
1
GREEK PAPYRI 215
of one of the alphabets. These had settled into
two leading groups, the Ionian (in which the
Corinthian may be included) and the Chalcidian.
The Ionian, which was developed in the famous
colony of that name, deviated more from the
Phoenician type than the Chalcidian. It was
adopted by Athens 483 B.C., and became the
classic alphabet of Greece. From it there
sprang the Slavonic, Coptic, and other alpha-
bets, while the Chalcidian gave birth to the
alphabets of Western Europe.
(2) Russian. — A quaint and probably trust-
worthy tradition tells how the Greek alphabet
was imported into Russia. " Formerly," says
John, Exarch of Bulgaria, who wrote in the
ninth century, " the Slavonians had no books,
but they read and made divinations by means
of pictures and figures cut on wood, being
pagans. After they had received baptism they
were compelled, without any proper rules, to
write their Slavonic tongue by means of Greek
and Latin letters. But how could they write
well in Greek letters such words as Bog, Zhivot,
Zelo, or Tserkov, and others like these? And
so many years passed by. But then God,
loving the human race, had pity on the Slavo-
nians, and sent them St. Constantine, the
Philosopher, called Cyril, a just and tru-e man,
who made for them an alphabet of thirty-eight
letters, of which some were after the Greek
style, and some after the Slavonic language."
The variety of sounds in Slavonic involved the
addition of ten characters to Cyril's alphabet,
and although that number was afterwards
2l6 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
reduced, the Russian remains the most cumber-
some and ungainly of alphabets.
(3) Coptic, or, more correctly, the Coptic
script of Egypt under the Romans. Notwith-
standing the advent of Cresar Augustus as Pre-
fect of Egypt, Greek influence prevailed, and the
native Christians, in transcribing the Coptic
version of the Bible, used the Greek alphabet,
borrowing some half-dozen of the ancient
Egyptian demotic signs to express sounds
unrepresented by the Greek. But, as through-
out Mohammedan countries, Arabic has sup-
planted Coptic, which is now used only for
liturgical purposes, "perhaps little if at all
understood by the priests who have to use it
in the services of the Church. '^
(4) Latifi. — This is, far and away, the most
important of all alphabets. As stated above, it
is derived from the Chalcidian type of the
Hellenic, so called because in use at Chalcis,
in Euboea, an island of the ^E^gean, whence
migrated one of the several Greek colonies
planted in Southern Italy. As the oldest Italic
scripts — copying the older method of the Greek
— read from right to left, and as the first thing
aimed at by the colonists would be the use of
common sound-signs and numerals, there is
good warrant for fixing the date of the introduc-
tion of the Greek alphabet into Italy at about
the eighth century before Christ. The various
derived scripts — Umbrian, Oscan, Etruscan,
and others — have all, the Latin alone excepted,
passed away. The ultimate dominance of the
Latins brought about the abolition of every
GREEK PAPYRI 217
Other alphabet than their own, which, becoming
the alphabet of the Roman Empire, and then of
Christendom, secured an everlasting supremacy.
It was the vehicle of Greek and Roman culture
to Western Europe ; it is the vehicle of all the
culture of the progressive races of the world.
Although essentially identical with the Greek,
it took its own line, and that, compared with the
Slavonic, a simple one. The earliest Indo-
European or " Aryan " language contained, so
far as can be discovered, twelve consonants and
three vowels (/, a, u\ and to these last the Latin
added e and o. It at first rejected the Greek K,
and used C for the sounds of both k and^, but
later on added a bar to the lower end of C,
converting it into G. Similarly, R is but a
variation of P, by the addition of a stroke below
the crook. And while the later Greek rejected
Q, the Latin retained it. But not to multiply
examples, citations of which are confusing in
the absence of explanations of the causes
necessitating changes of form, explanations too
technical for admission here (see for examples
Taylor, ii. 140), it may suffice to give a few
specimens of variations between the older and
newer Latin and Greek forms.
In the early empire the Romans used two
sorts of characters. Capital and Cursive. The
Capitals were square-shaped or rustic, i.e.
slightly ornamented. They were used for
inscriptions and other writing demanding
prominence, as we use capitals nowadays,
borrowing the old Roman forms. The Cursive
or running characters are the originals of our
2l8
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
small types, and were used for correspondence
and other purposes where rapid writing was an
object, abbreviations, which are the forerunners
of our modern '-shorthand,'"' being sometimes
employed. Out of this cursive hand there arose
Classical
Latin.
Old
Latin.
Old
Greek.
Classical
Greek.
<
> >
A
L
\r
v\-vv/<
A
P
P
p p
n
R
k
k V
p
S
^
s \ z
z
X
X
X + 5
^
FINAL LATIN- AND GREEK FORMS COMPARED WITH THEIK
PROTOTYPES IN THE OLDER ALPHABETS
a variety of hand-writings, the most important
among these being the Irish " semi-uncial."
The appearance of this script in that island is
one of the problems of graphiology. " Xo Irish
hand is known out of which it could have
GREEK PAPYRI 219
arisen. And yet in the sixth century Ireland
suddenly becomes the chief school of Western
calligraphy, and the so-called Irish uncial blazes
forth in full splendour as the most magnificent
of all mediaeval scripts. Only one conclusion
seems possible. Some time in the fifth century
a fully-formed book-hand must have been
introduced by St. Patrick (432-458 a.d.),
doubtless from Gaul, where he received his
consecration. And this must have been cul-
tivated as a calligraphic script in the Irish
monasteries, which at this time enjoyed com-
parative immunity from the ravages of the
Teutonic invaders, who, in the fifth century,
desolated Italy, Gaul, and Spain." (Taylor, ii.
173.) Irish monks introduced it into Nor-
thumbria, and in course of time there was
derived from it the '' Caroline minuscule," as it
is called, because it was introduced in the reign
of Charlemagne in the famous school at Tours
founded by Alcuin of York, a celebrated
scholar of the eighth century, and friend of
the Emperor. As a clear hand, compressible
into a small space, it grew rapidly in favour
till the end of the twelfth century, when a
period of decadence, of which the ugly " Black
Letter " was the result, set in and held sway in
Western Europe for a generation after the
discovery of printing with movable types. The
Black-letter characters were imitations of the
coarse thick characters of the monkish manu-
scripts, and it was not till the early part of the
sixteenth century that they were displaced in
England by the Roman letters, whose basis is
2 20 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
the Caroline minuscule (see p. 37). Here, how-
ever, we are on the threshold of the '* chapel,"
and must retrace our steps for brief survey of
the few changes introduced into the Latin
alphabet in adapting it to the requirements of
the English language. These are shown in the
admirable table borrowed from Canon Taylor.
{History of the Alphabet^ i. 72.) The order
of the letters (an unexplained problem in the
history of the alphabet) approximates to that of
the Phoenicians, and their names are based on
the same principle as that of the Latin. Running
our eye down the table we note that our alpha-
bet provides for certain phonetic variations by
turning the Latin I into I and J, and VV or
UV into double U == W. The Anglo-Saxon,
which appears to be partly Roman and partly
Irish in origin, had borrowed two useful charac-
ters from the Runic, ]^ = w, named iven, and
]•> = th, named thorn, which for a time formed
part of the English alphabet. The thorn has
been revived of late, as a bastard archaic, in the
printing of the as j^, with consequent mfspro-
nunciation of that word by those who see it
thus changed. Both Y and Z were late impor-
tations from the Greek into the Latin, being
used only in Greek loan-words to denote sounds
peculiar to the Greek ; hence, as the most
recent arrivals, their appearance at the end of
the alphabet. Some of our letters are of little
use ; K makes C superfluous, and Q and X are
of no more service to us than they were to the
Romans. So that, for practical purposes, we
have only twenty-three letters wherewith to
GREEK PAPYRI 221
GENEALOGY OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
Old Greek
Euboean
Latm.
•
Uncial.
Minuscule.
Venetian.
Ronoan.
A
A
.A
A
A a
a
a
B
B
B
Bb
b
b
b
r
r
C
c
^5
c
599
g
c
g
A
D
Oo
li 5
d
d
^
<^
E
ee
e e
e
e
F
F
F
F
f
f
f
I
I
Z
?
\
z
2
B
H
H
ijb
\)
h
h
^
1
1
J
I 1
'J
ij
K
K
K
K
K fe
k
k
V
t-
l^L
L L
I
I
1
r
M
MM
CD
in
7
m
y
/V
N
rj
n
n
n
£
+
X
JO
X I
X
X
O
o
^
r
r
p p
P
P
P
p
9
9
Q
qq
q
?
q
?
ff
RR
K
n r
r
r
^
s
^ S
s
r ^
Is
fs
T
T
T
T C
r t
t
t
Y
VY
( UV
I Y
u
T
ui^ to
y
U V w
3
U V w
J
r ;
JI m 17 V • CI VII.
22 2 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
indicate at least thirty-two sounds. Thus our
alphabet, like our spelling (which is ever at war
with our pronunciation, to the bewilderment of
school children and foreigner's), is what it is from
the lack of any consistent rule. Nevertheless,
so workable a set of signs has secured a footing
which, made firmer by the art of printing, is
not likely to be disturbed by any processes
of phonetic change which mark the course of
speech. To that art of printing is also due
those modifications in handwriting which dis-
tinguish the penmanship of past and present
times. As has been seen, while Germany
remained in fetters to the eye-distracting Black
letter, we freed ourselves by adoption of the
clear Roman type; hence the disappearance,
save in legal documents and a few show art-
books, of the cramped hand which prevailed
down to the sixteenth century. So the hand-
writing of to-day (good, bad, and indifferent,
as the personal equation of each one of us
shapes it), which we learned at school through
the stages of "pot-hooks and hangers" to the
grandest flourishes of copy-book "maxims," is
derived from the same source as the printed
alphabet.
CHAPTER XI
RUNES AND OGAMS
The Runic alphabet originated among the
Scandinavians, who probably adapted it from
some other script, since no traces of any
pictographic characters whence it may have
been derived have been found. Some scholars
hold that it is derived from the " Phoenician "
alphabet ; others say that it comes from the
Latin. Canon Taylor has a definite theory
that it is a degraded form of the Greek
alphabet ; for in the sixth century b.c. the
Goths swarmed in the region south of the
Baltic and east of the Vistula, and in their
trading relations with Greek colonists north of
the Black Sea may readily have obtained a
knowledge of the Greek alphabet. The
question, however, of origin remains, and is
likely to remain, unsettled.
The sharp, angular form of the runes proves
that they were incised on wood, stone, or some
such rigid material, and these characters persist
in the few manuscripts which have been found.
The primitive Gothic alphabet is named, on the
acrologic principle, "futhorc," after the first
six letters,/ u^ th, o, r, c. It was divided into
2 24 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
three parts or " aetts,'"' named after the first
letter of each "aett" or family — "Frey's aett,"
" Hagl's aett," and " Tyr's aett " — as shown in
the following illustration from an article on
Runes by Miss Gertrude Rawlings {Knowledge^
I St October, 1896).
9^^r^ ni-io^bts i^^nwr^ixi^
rUTbORCGW H N I Y EO P A S^ TB £ Mj.Ng D O
RUNE ALPHABET
The Scandinavian, Anglian, and Manx runes
are local variants of this oldest form. Runic
inscriptions — monumental and sepulchral —
have a wide, although exclusive, range. They
are found in the valley of the Danube, but not
in Germany ; in America, but not in Ireland ;
in the Isle of Man, but not in Wales — thus
evidencing their restriction within Scandinavian
lines of migration. The oldest was found at
Sandwich, in Kent ; but an especially interesting
example is the well-known Ruthwell Cross in
Dumfriesshire, on which is inscribed a poem,
"The Dream of the Holy Rood," ascribed
to C?edmon, the herdsman poet of the seventh
century. The early voyage of the Vikings to
A^ineland, as they named America, has illus-
tration in a Runic epitaph cut in a rock on
the Potomac. " Here lies Syasi, the fair one
of Western Iceland, the widow of Koldr, sister
of Thorgr, by her father, aged twenty-five years.
God be merciful to her." The old alphabet
was displaced by the Latin on the con-
RUNES AND OGAMS 225
version of the peoples of Northern Europe to
Christianity, but not before Ulphilas, the
Bishop of the Goths, had woven some of its
characters into the compound script which
was the vehicle of his memorable translation
of the Gospels, the lovely manuscript of which,
in gold and silver letters on purple vellum, is
worth a visit to the University of Upsala to see.
The curious Ogam alphabet, which may
date from the fifth century a.d., and the use
of which did not extend outside the British
Isles, is held by some scholars to be derived
from the Runic, but its characters indicate
that more probably it is a debased copy of the
Roman. Ogam, according to Professor Rhys,
the highest authority on the subject, probably
means "skilled use of words." The letters
are formed by straight or slanting strokes
drawn above, or beneath, or right through
horizontal or perpendicular lines. The alphabet
is divided into four aicmes or groups, each
containing five letters : the first aicme, b, l, f,
s, N being placed under the line (assuming
this to be horizontal) ; the second aicme, h, t,
D, C, Qn, above it; the third aicme, m, g,
Ng, f(?) r, diagonally through it ; and the
fourth aicme, comprising the vowels a, o, u,
E, I, intersecting it at right angles. Canon
Taylor sees in the ogams an adaptation of the
runes to the needs of the engraver, "notches
cut with a knife on the edge of a squared
staff being substituted for the ordinary runes."
And he thinks that the derivation of the ogams
2 26 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
from runes is shown in the fact that their
names agree with the names of runes of corre-
sponding value, and that they are found ex-
clu'^ively in regions where Scandinavian settle-
ments were established. Professor Rhys regards
them as "probably the work of a grammarian
acquainted with Roman writing, but too proud
to adopt it." The larger number of Ogam
inscriptions occur in Ireland : others are
scattered over Scotland, Wales, and the south-
west of England.
It may be thought that any survey of the
history of the Alphabet, however free from
overcrowding in detail, and however popular
in treatment, would outline the story of the
origin of, and changes in, each of the twenty-
six letters which are, for the English-speaking
races, the vehicle of communication and the
depository of knowledge. But, probably,
enough has been said to show that the informa-
tion which would alone warrant such table of
derivations is not yet forthcoming, and, perhaps,
never will be. The most plausible theory that
the wit of man, supported by a set of facts
that seemed to hang well together, could devise,
was formulated by M. de Rouge, and it has
been seen that the epigraphic material found
in the ^-Egean renders his apparently well-based
and coherent theory no longer tenable.
Neither would there be advantage in cata-
loguing the two hundred and fifty alphabets
which have come into being since prehistoric
man scratched his rude pictographs on the
faces of cliffs and on fragments of slate
RUNES AND OGAMS 227
or bone. Some fifty of these alphabets have
survived, and of these about half are found in
India, but, whatever of historical value they
may hold, their use is restricted and local.
The rest are, in the main, variations of three
scripts — Roman, Arabic, and Chinese — and an
outlook' on the world's course makes it no
matter of doubt that it is with the Roman,
as the vehicle of culture of the most advancing
races of mankind, that there lies the maintenance
of supremacy and the extension of its sway.
•^ + Aabcdefghijklmnopq g
S rfstuvwxyz&: aeiou ^
U ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQ E
RSTUVWXYZ S
a e 1 o u
abebibobub
^ ac ec ic oc uc
adedidodud
a e I o u
babebibobu
ca ce ci co cu
dadedidodu
I n the Name of the Father, and of the
in tne iName 01 tne ratner.anaot the rr
Son, and of the Holy Ghoft. Amtn. g
^ /^ U R Father, which art in ~
S V_y Heaven, hallowed be thy
2 Name ; thy Kingdom come, ^^
§ thy Will be done on Earth, g
n as it is in Heaven. Give us S
g thisDay ourdai]yBread;and H
g forgive us our trefpafles, as g
^ we forgive them that trefpafs S
g againft us : And lead us not §
S into Temptation, but deliver S
^ us from Evil. Amen. p
HORN BOOK,
ON'CE THE UNIVERSAL PRIMER
( N01U so rxccssivcly rure that a ,^opei exa7)iple fetches £^o and upivards ).
INDEX
Abu Simbel, 206
Aerology, 86, 104, 153,
210, 223
^gean civilisation, 159, 187-
194
Akerblad, 129
Akkadian civilisation, 105
,, cuneiform, 100,
170
religion, 105
Alaskan life, pictograph of,
65,66
Algerian rock-paintings, 33
Almanack symbols, 102
Alphabet, Abyssinian, 213
Arabic, 209
Aramean, 207-8
Armenian, 211
birth of the, 124
Chalcidian, 199,
215, 216
Coptic, 216
Corean, 87
Dravidian, 207
English, 37, 220-
222
Ethiopic, 213
Georgian, 211
Greek, 136, 213
Hebrew, 136, 151,
208, 213
Hellenic, 207, 213
Indian, 213
Indo - Bactrian,
211, 212
Alphabet, Ionian, 215
Irish, 218
,, Latin, 38, 199,
216, 217
,, Mongolian, 208
,, Ogam, 225
,, Pehlevi, 93, 211
,, Phoenician, 188,
194, ig6, 207,
213
,, Pictograph and,
26
,, Runic, 220, 223
Russian, 215
,, Saba?an, 212
Samaritan, 152
stages of develop-
ment of, 38,
39
,, Syriac, 208
,, variations in Eng-
lish, 220
Amenophis III., no
America, development of
man in, 74
Arabic numerals, 209, 212
Art, prehistoric, 24, 25
Asoka, 211
Assyrian numerals, 210
Australian aborigines, 27
grave-posts of, 52
rock-paintings of,
29
Ave Maria, 80
Aztecs, 75
229
230
INDEX
Baal Lebanon, vessels
from, 145, 146
Babylonian characters, 99,
186
Babylonians, 105. 157, 208
Bark, picture-writing on, 58,
59- 67. 68
Behistun rock - inscription,
94, 95, loi, 128, 181
Belts, wampum, 45-51
Benefit of clergy, 22
" Bible," etymology of, 10
Bible as charm, 19
Bite, written charm against
centipede, 19
Black letter, 219
Body, parts of, used for
measurements, loi
" Book," etymology of, 10
" Book of Breathings," 119
"Book of the Dead," 117,
125, 200
Borchardt, Dr., 116
Brahma, 16, 17
Budge, Dr. Wallis, 119,
123, 127, 130, 133
Burckhardt, 180
Bushman rain-charm, 34
Bushmen rock - paintings,
30-32
Cadger's Map, 57
Cadmus, 17
Cosdmon, 224
Cave-man. art of, 24, 25
Census-roll, Indian, 71
ChampoUion, 129, 130
Charms, written, 16, 17, 19,
20, 119
Chinese characters, 83
,, determinatives, 85
picture-writing, 83,
84, 103
Clay tablets, 89
Cleopatra, 130, 131
Clermont-Ganneau, M., 146
Clog almanack, 45
"Code," etymology of, 10
Cords, knotted, 39, 43, 82
Corean alphabet, 87
Creation tablet, no
Cretan hieroglyphs, 167,
184, i95
linear characters,
171, 173. 175. 184
Crete, Mycenai and, 182
, , origin of ^^^gean civili-
sation in, 192-94
relics of script in, 51
Syria, Egypt, and,
'159
Cuneiform writing, 89-112
,, discovery
of. 93-97
,, meaning
of, 89
,, mode of,
98
Cursive characters, 217
Cypriote's syllabary, 178
Cyprus, civilisation in, 179
Darius, 93, 95, 127
Delia Valle, 90
Delphi, 162
Deluge tablet, in
Demotic writing, 115, 127,
216
De Rougt?, 139, 142-45, 226
De Sacy, 93
Determinatives, 85, 100, 103,
122, 170
"Digits," etymology of, loi
Dikta, Mount, slab from, 171
Diodoros, 196
"Diploma," etymology of,
ir
Disease, barbaric theory of,
60
Edwards, Chilperic, 112
Egypt and Babylonia, 112
INDEX
231
Egyptian art, 115
demotic, 115, 127,
216
hieratic, 115, 125-
127, 139, 155,
194
,, hieroglyphs, 41,
I 14- 124
,, numerals, 210
writing, stages of,
115
Enchorial writing, 127
Eshmunazar, sarcophagus
of, 140, 153
Eteocretans, 184
Europe, continuity of man
in, 24, 189
Eusebius, 137
Evans, Artliur, 25, 51, 154,
159, 177, 189, 193, 195
FiNGKKS as pictographs,
lOI
Flinders Petrie, Professor,
116, 177, 185, 186, 202
Frazer, J. G. , 193
Gardner, Prof. P., 158
Goulas, 162
Grcecia Major, 199
Graffito, 161
Grave-posts, Indian, 53-55
Greek alphabet, 199
papyri, 198-206
,, settlements, 198
signary, 185
Grotefend, Dr., 93, loi
Gurob, 177, 202
H.\DDOi\, Professor, 19
Hal^vy, 104
Haynes. 108
Herculaneum papyri, 201
Herodas, mimes of, 202-204
Herodotus, 39, 92, 97, 134,
137, 138, 190, 199
Hieraticwriting,ii5, 125-27^
139. 155. 194
Hieroglyphic wheels, 45
Hieroglyphs, Cadger's, 57
,, Egyptian, 114-
124
Hittite, 150,
168,173,181,
195
,, Mexican, 73
Hilprecht, Dr., 108
Hittites, 179-81, 185
Hoffman, Dr., 45, 52, 54, 64
Hogarth, D. G. , 159
Horus, 158
Hunting expedition, picto-
graph of, 62, 64
Hutchinson, Mark, 32
Hyksos, 119, 154
Ibkkian signary, 185
Ideographic stage of alpha-
bet, 38, 72-79
Ideographs, loi, 115, 120-21,
167
,, comparative, 124
Indian and stolen loaves, 16
,, census roll, 71
,, chief, pictograph of
life of, 67
,, grave-posts. 53, 54
petition for fishing
rights, 69
Innuit record of departure,
72
Inscriptions, cuneiform, 90
Ionia, 194
Iroquois, 50
Isis, 130, 158
Itzcoatl, 79
Japanese writing, 86
Jesus, "Sayings" of, 205
Kahun, 177
Karian signary, 185
232
INDEX
Keane, Professor, 99, 191
Kenyon, Mr., 200
Klein, Dr., 147
Knosos, 162, 191
Knotted cords as records,
39. 82
Latix alphabet, 38, 199,
216-17
Layard, Sir A., 98
Legends in Genesis, origin
of, 112
" Letters," etymology of, 10
" Libel," etymology of, 10
" Library," etymology of, 10
Linear signs, Cretan, 171,
Lion weights from Nineveh,
146, 149
Love-letter, pictorial, 58
Love-song, pictorial, 58
Magic through writing, 16
Mahafty, Professor, 91, 97
Malacca, East, 19
Mallery, Colonel, 64, 73
Man in Araerica, 74
Maneh, 150
Mariner, \\'illiam, 14, 15
Marshman, Dr., 82
Masons' marks, 163
Maspero, 103
Mathews, R. H. , 29
Max Muller, Prof., 9, 182
Mayas, script of the, 75-79
Medicine-man, song of, 59
,, bad, 61
Mediterranean signary, 185,
189, 195
Memory-aids, 37
Memphis, 138, 188. 202
Menes (?), tomb of, 116
Mexican hieroglyphs, 73
Military expedition, picto-
graph of, 67, 70
Milk-stones, 160
Minuscule, 37, 219
Mnemonic stage, 38, 39-51
Moabite Stone, 144, 145, 147
Moses, legend of, 106
Mvcencean civilisation, 186-
188, 193
,, relics, 51, 176,
183
,, relics in Sardi-
nia, 189
Nagaki, 17, 87, 207
Nebo, 16
Nebuchadnezzar, 94
Nestorians, 208
New Zealand totem-marks,
52
Niebuhr, Carsten, 92
Nineveh, 98, 99, 146
Nippur, discovery of oldest-
known writing at, 108
Nuffar {see Nippur)
Number of words from let-
ters, 9
Numerals, 209, 212
Odin, 17
Ogam characters, 225
Ogmios, 17
Ormuzd, 96
Osiris, 117
Oxyrhynchus, 205
Pal.i-:ography, Greek, 199-
206
" Paper," etymology of, 10
Papyrus, 10, 125, 126, 200
" Papyrus of Ani," 119
Prisse, 126, 140,
145. 153. 200
" Parchment, "etymology of,
II
Paternoster, 80
Pausanias, 190, 193
Payne, 76, 77
Pelasgians, 190
INDEX
-^6Z
Pen, antiquity of metal, ii
Persepolis, 90
Peruvians, 40, 75
Philae, obelisk at, 130
Phoenician alphabet, 152,
188, 194, 196,
206, 213
,, characters, 135,
137.148,151.
154, 177. 185
Phoenicians, 179, 188, 194,
195
Phonetic stage of alphabet,
38, 79-81
Phonogram, 39
Pictograph parent of alpha-
bet, 26
Pictographs of man, 56
Pictorial stage of alphabet,
^.38. 51-72.
Picture-writing as charm, 19
Picture-writing, illustrations
of, 35, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64,
66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 83
Pinturos, Maya, 77
Planetary signs, loi
Pliny, 135
Poole, R., 153
Prnesos, 160, 184
Precepts of Ptah-Hetep, 127
Prehistoric art, 24
Pre-Phoenici.m civilisation,
186
Prousia, 183
Ptolemy III., 133
Ptolemy V., 131, 133
Ptolemy XV,, 123
QuiPU, 39, 40
Raix-charms, 33-35
Rameses III., 180
Rawlinson, Sir Henry, 94,
97
Rebus, 79, 123
Reinach, M, , 189
Renan, M., 146
Rhys, Professor, 226
Rock-paintings of Australian
natives, 27-29
Rock-paintings of Bushmen,
30. 31
Rock - paintings of North
Africa (Algeria), 33
Roman alphabet, 37, 217
capitals, 37, 217
type, 37
Rosary, 39
Rosetta Stone, 94, 128-33,
181
Rosetta Stone, inscription
on, 132
Runic alphabet, 215, 220,
223-25
Runic letters, 104
Russian alphabet, 215
,, letters, 104
St. Patrick, 219
Sardanapalus v., 16
Sardinia, 189
Sargon I., 106, 107, 180
Sassanid inscriptions, 93
Schliemann, Dr., 158, 182
Schoolcraft, 53
Seal-stones, engraved, 51,
160, 167
Semang rain-charm, 35
Semitic characters, 140
Signary, Greek and Medi-
terranean, 185, 195
Siloam, Pool of, 146, 151
Skin disease, charm against,
20
Spencer and Gillen, 29
Stele of Canopus, 133
,, Shera, 116
the Vultures, ic6
" Style," etymology of, 11
Syllabaria, 103
Syllabaries, 39, 103, 173,
178
234
INDEX
Symbols, 38, 73, 102, 120,
164-66
Sympathetic magic, 21, 61
"Tablet," etymology of, 11
Tallies or tally-sticks, 44
Tasmanians, 2j
Tattooing, 51
Taylor, Canon Isaac, 38, 78,
99, 102, 123, 125, 135, 139,
142, 145, 149, 154, 199.
2g6, 219, 223, 225
Tell-el-Amarna tablets, 109,
no
Tell-el-Hesy, 177, 179
Thoth, 16, 126, 132
Tiryns, 191, 194
Tonga Islands, 14
Totem-marks, 52
Trade marks, 51
,, signs, 102
Trench, Archbishop, 10
Ts'ang Chien, 16
Tsountas, Dr., 171, 173, 185
Tylor, Dr., 41, 45, 55, 80,
81, 86
Tyre, 137
Ulphilas, Bishop, 225
Uncial letters, 37, 219
Virgin's Pool, 146, 151
"Volume," etymology of,
II
Von Tschudi, 41
Vowel signs, 92, 124, 213
Wachsmutii, 191
Wampum belts, 45-51
War-song, pictograph of,
68
Wheels, hieroglyphic, 45
Whitney, Professor, 85, 114
Writing as magic charm, 16
,, belief in divine origin
of, 16
, , value of invention of,
13
Yahvveh. 17, 149
Young, Dr. Thomas, 129
Yucatan script, 73
Zodiacal signs, 102
Zoega, 129
GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED, LONDON
THE CRETAN EXPLORATION FUND.
patron :
n.R.H. PRINCE GEORGE OF GREECE,
High Commissioner of the Powers ia Crete.
Bircctovs :
ARTHUR J. EVANS, M.A,, F.S.A.,
Ashinole's Keeper, and Hon. Fellcnv of Brasenose College, Oxford.
DAVID G. HOGARTH, M.A., F.S.A., F.R.G.S.,
Felloiv of Magdtilen College, Oxford, and Director of the British
School at A thens.
1bon. Ureasurer :
GEORGE A. MACMILLAN. Esq.,
Hon. Secretary of the Society for Provioting Hellenic Studies.
Ibon. Sccrctarv :
JOHN L. MYRES, Esq., M.A., F.S.A., F.R.G.S.,
Student of Christ Church, Oxford.
The followiyig Appeal has been issued by the Directors : —
The new conditions in which Crete is placed, and the final emancipation
of the island from Turkish rule, have, at last, rendered it possible to
organise a serious effort to recover the evidences of her early civilisation.
How important are the results which a thorough-going investigation
in this field holds out to archa;ological science may be gathered from
what has already been brought to light in far less favourable circum-
stances. The path of Cretan exploration was opened out by the English
travellers Pashley and Spratt. Their exploratory labours have been
followed, in more recent years, by the striking discoveries of Halbherr
and Fabricius. The great inscription containing the early laws of
Gortyna stands alone as a monument of Greek civic legislation. The
bronzes of the Idaean cave huve afforded a unique revelation of the
beginnings of classical Greek art. Further researches, to which English
investigation has once more contributed, have brought into relief the
important part played by the still earlier civilisation of Mycenae, the
wide diffusion of its remains, and even the existence in the island of an
indigenous system of sign-writing anterior to the use of the Phoenician
alphabet. Additional indications, indeed, have come to light which
carry back the chronology of the earlier relics of Cretan culture far
beyond the d;ite of Schliemann's great discoveries on the mainland of
Greece, and attest an intercourse with Egypt going back to the third
and, it may be, even the fourth millennium before our era. We have
here in Crete the first stepping-stone of European civilisation.
The better to solve the many interesting problems thus opened up
it has been decided to form a "Cretan Exploration Fund," under the
direction of the above named and in co-operation with the British School
at At'nens, in order to carry out a series of comprehensive excavations.
In order fully to realise this scheme it will be necessary to raise a sum
of at least ;{^5ooo. The object has a real claim on British enterprise.
From a national point of view, this task of scientific exploration in Crete
is a fitting sequel to the joint work of political emancipation in which
we have taken part. It may be mentioned in this connection that the
French School at Athens is already organising plans of excavation on
other Cretan sites, and that a mission with a similar object is being
despatched by the Italian Go\ernment.
THE LIBRARY OF USEFUL STORIES
PRICE ONE SHILLING EACH
THE STORY OF LIFE'S MECHANISM. By H. W. Conn. With
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THE STORY OF THE WANDERINGS OF ATOMS. By M. M.
Pattisox Muir, M.A.
THE STORY OF ICE IN THE PRESENT AND PAST. By W. A.
Ukend. With S7 Illu'itrations.
THE STORY OF ECLIPSES. By G. F. Chambers, F.R.A.S. With
iQ Illustrations.
THE STORY OF THE BRITISH RACE. By John Mi nro. With
THE STORY OF THE MIND. Bv Prof. J. M. Baliamn-.
THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY: How the
World Became Known. r.vjf>s}:in Jacobs. With 24 Maps, &c.
THE STORY OF THE COTTON PLANT. By F. Wilkinson,
F.C;.S. With sS Illu~tr.-\tions.
THE STORY OF RELIGIONS. Bv the Rev. E. D. Price, Y.C..<
THE STORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY. By A. T. Storv. Wiii.
Illustrations.
THE STORY OF LIFE IN THE SEAS. By Sydney J. HicksoN,
F.In.S. With 42 liki-tratioiis.
THE STORY OF THE BRITISH COINAGE. By G. B. RA^vLI^•GS.
With iiiS Illustrati"ns.
THE STORY OF THE POTTER. By C. F. Binns. With 57 Filus-
trations of Ancient and .Mo'iern Pottery.
THE STORY OF GERM LIFE : Bacteria. P-y H. W. Conn> With
:;4 Illustrations.
THE STORY OF THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE. By Douglas
Archibald, ^\"ilh 44 Mustraiinns.
THE STORY OF THE WEATHER. ByG. F. Chambrrs, F.R.A.S.
With =50 Illustrations,
THE STORY OF FOREST AND STREAM. By Ja.mes Rodwav,
F.L. S. With 27 Illu-trations.
THE STORY OF THE CHEMICAL ELEMENTS. P.y M. M.
Pattisun Mcir, M.A.
THE STORY OF EXTINCT CIVILISATIONS OF THE EAST.
Bv R. E. Andkrsov, ^I.A. With Maps.
THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY. By J. Mlnro. With 100 Illus-
trations.
THE STORY OF A PIECE OF COAL. By E. A. Martin, F.G.S.
With 3S Illustratio-is.
THE STORY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM. By G. F. Chambers,
F.R.A.S. With 28 Illustrations.
THE STORY OF THE EARTH IN PAST AGES. By H. G.
Seelhv, F.R.S. With 40 Illustrations.
THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. By Grant Allen. With 49
Illustrations.
THE STORY OF PRIMITIVE MAN. By Ei)\varu Clodd. With
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THE STORY OF THE STARS. By G. F. Chambers, F.R.A.S.
N\ ith 24 Illustrations.
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