1. The Origin of Letters.--2. The Phoenician Alphabet and Inscriptions.--
3, The Greek Alphabet. Its Three Epochs.--4. The Medieval Scripts. The
Irish. The Anglo-Saxon. The Roman. The Gothic. The Runic.
1. THE ORIGIN OF LETTERS.--Alphabetic writing is an art easy to acquire,
but its invention has tasked the genius of the three most gifted nations
of the ancient world. All primitive people have begun to record events and
transmit messages by means of rude pictures of objects, intended to
represent things or thoughts, which afterwards became the symbols of
sounds. For instance, the letter _M_ is traced down from the
conventionalized picture of an owl in the ancient language of Egypt,
_Mulak_. This was used first to denote the bird itself; then it stood for
the name of the bird; then gradually became a syllabic sign to express the
sound "mu," the first syllable of the name, and ultimately to denote "M,"
the initial sound of that syllable.
In like manner _A_ can be shown to be originally the picture of an eagle,
_D_ of a hand, _F_ of the horned asp, _R_, of the mouth, and so on.
Five systems of picture writing have been independently invented,--the
Egyptian, the Cuneiform, the Chinese, the Mexican, and the Hittite. The
tradition of the ancient world, which assigned to the Phoenicians the
glory of the invention of letters, declared that it was from Egypt that
they originally derived the art of writing, which they afterwards carried
into Greece, and the latest investigations have confirmed this tradition.
2. THE PHOENICIAN ALPHABET.--Of the Phoenician alphabet the Samaritan is
the only living representative, the Sacred Script of the few families who
still worship on Mount Gerizim. With this exception, it is only known to
us by inscriptions, of which several hundred have been discovered. They
form two well-marked varieties, the Moabite and the Sidonian. The most
important monument of the first is the celebrated Moabite stone,
discovered in 1868 on the site of the ancient capital of the land of Moab,
portions of which are preserved in the Louvre. It gives an account of the
revolt of the King of Moab against Jehoram, King of Israel, 890 B.C. The
most important inscription of the Sidonian type is that on the magnificent
sarcophagus of a king of Sidon, now one of the glories of the Louvre.
A monument of the early Hebrew alphabet, another offshoot of the
Phoenician, was discovered in 1880 in an inscription in the ancient tunnel
which conveys water to the pool of Siloam.
3. THE GREEK ALPHABET.--The names, number, order, and forms of the
primitive Greek alphabet attest its Semitic origin. Of the many
inscriptions which remain, the earliest has been discovered, not in
Greece, but upon the colossal portrait statues carved by Rameses the
Great, in front of the stupendous cave temple at Abou-Simbel, at the time
when the Hebrews were still in Egyptian bondage. In the seventh century B.
C., certain Greek mercenaries in the service of an Egyptian king inscribed
a record of their visit in five precious lines of writing, which the dry
Nubian atmosphere has preserved almost in their pristine sharpness.
The legend, according to which Cadmus the Tyrian sailed for Greece in
search of Europa, the damsel who personified the West, designates the
island of Thera as the earliest site of Phoenician colonization in the
Aegean, and from inscriptions found there this may be regarded as the
first spot of European soil on which words were written, and they exhibit
better than any others the progressive form of the Cadmean alphabet. The
oldest inscriptions found on Hellenic soil bearing a definite date are
those cut on the pedestals of the statues which lined the sacred way
leading to the temple of Apollo, near Miletus. Several of those, now in
the British Museum, range in date over the sixth century B.C. They belong,
not to the primitive alphabet, but to the Ionian, one of the local
varieties which mark the second stage, which may be called the epoch of
transition, which began in the seventh and lasted to the close of the
fifth century B.C. It is not till the middle of the fifth century that we
have any dated monuments belonging to the Western types. Among these are
the names of the allied states of Hellas, inscribed on the coils of the
three-headed bronze serpent which supported the gold tripod dedicated to
the Delphian Apollo, 476 B.C. This famous monument was transported to
Byzantium by Constantine the Great, and still stands in the Hippodrome at
Constantinople. Of equal interest is the bronze Etruscan helmet in the
British Museum, dedicated to the Olympian Zeus, in commemoration of the
great victory off Cumae, which destroyed the naval supremacy of the
Etruscans, 474 B.C., and is celebrated in an ode by Pindar.
The third epoch witnessed the emergence of the classical alphabets of
European culture, the Ionian and the Italic.
The Ionian has been the source of the Eastern scripts, Romaic, Coptic,
Slavic, and others. The Italic became the parent of the modern alphabets
of Western Europe.
4. THE MEDIAEVAL SCRIPTS.--A variety of national scripts arose in the
establishment of the Teutonic kingdoms upon the ruins of the Roman Empire.
But the most magnificent of all mediaeval scripts was the Irish, which
exercised a profound influence on the later alphabets of Europe. From a
combination of the Roman and Irish arose the Anglo-Saxon script, the
precursor of that which was developed in the ninth century by Alcuin of
York, the friend and preceptor of Charlemagne. This was the parent of the
Roman alphabet, in which our books are now printed. Among other
deteriorations, there crept in, in the fourteenth century, the Gothic or
black letter character, and these barbarous forms are still essentially
retained by the Teutonic nations though discarded by the English and Latin
races; but from its superior excellences the Roman alphabet is constantly
extending its range and bids fair to become the sole alphabet of the
future. In all the lands that were settled and overrun by the
Scandinavians, there are found multitudes of inscriptions in the ancient
alphabet of the Norsemen, which is called the Runic. The latest modern
researches seem to prove that this was derived from the Greek, and
probably dates back as far as the sixth century B.C.The Goths were early
in occupation of the regions south of the Baltic and east of the Vistula,
and in direct commercial intercourse with the Greek traders, from whom
they doubtless obtained a knowledge of the Greek alphabet, as the Greeks
themselves had gained it from the Phoenicians.