Transcriber's note: Some typographical errors in the printed work have been
corrected: they are listed at the end of the text.
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Page numbers enclosed by curly braces (example: {25}) have been
incorporated to facilitate the use of the Index.
Images of the original plates are available through Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/palographynote00quarrich
* * * * *
PALÆOGRAPHY
NOTES UPON THE
HISTORY OF WRITING
AND THE
MEDIEVAL ART OF ILLUMINATION
BY
BERNARD QUARITCH
Extended from a Lecture, delivered at a Conversazione of the Sette
of Odd Volumes, at the Galleries of the Royal Institute of
Painters in Water Colours, 12th December, 1893
London
_PRIVATELY PRINTED_
1894
_This Volume is_
Dedicated to my excellent friend
BROTHER ALEXANDER T. HOLLINGSWORTH,
_ARTIFICER, and PRESIDENT OF_
The Odd Volumes, 1893-94,
_AND TO_
THE BRETHREN OF THE SETTE
WITH WHICH
I have been united since 1878 in O. V. bond,
BY
_BERNARD QUARITCH_,
_Librarian to the Sette_.
London, 15 Piccadilly, _March 31st, 1894_.
{1}_Foreword_
Of the books which preceded the invention of Printing, a much larger
quantity is still extant than the world in general would suppose, but they
are nevertheless so widely scattered and so seldom immediately accessible,
that only a very long experience will enable any one to speak or to write
about them in other than a blundering fashion. So many qualifications are
required, that it may seem presumptuous in me to treat upon a matter
bristling with difficulties and uncertainties. The brief but admirable
outline of its history which Mr. Maunde Thompson has lately published is
likely to mislead the inexperienced into a belief that a science defined
with so much clearness and apparent ease may as easily be mastered. No one
knows better than that accomplished scholar how hard it would be to supply
sure and definite criteria for the guidance of palæographical students in
all the branches of their fascinating pursuit. My excuse must be that the
observations which appear in the present opusculum may be useful to some
who are unable for various reasons to give the necessary fulness of
{2}study to Mr. Thompson's work, and who, while loving manuscripts as well
as I do, have not had so large an experience. I may venture to justify
myself by a personal anecdote. The author of the "Stones of Venice" once
said that he was surprised by my apparently exact knowledge of the
commercial value of manuscripts; and my reply was that, as I had for twenty
years been the buyer of, or the underbidder for, all the fine examples
which had appeared in the public auctions, there was no great reason for
his wonder.
The following sketch will consist of a number of cursory remarks upon the
calligraphy and the ornamentation of medieval manuscripts; preceded by an
historical sketch, arranged in chronological paragraphs, of the beginnings
and the gradual diffusion of the art of writing throughout the world.
_The Beginnings of Writing_
Palæography is the branch of science which deals with ancient writing
([Greek: palaia graphê]). As the Greek word for writing comprises a great
deal more than the work of pen and ink, palæographical study would be
imperfect if it did not take into consideration the ancient inscriptions
upon stone and metal which are usually left to numismatists and other
archæologists. In a small treatise like the present, no such ambitious and
comprehensive treatment is intended. The object is mainly to summarise the
results of other men's labour, and to give a general idea of what is known
at the present day about the diffusion of the art of writing and the
methods of producing books before the sixteenth century.
The name for _book_ in various ancient languages is indicative of the
earliest stage in the history of writing. The English word itself appears
in its oldest written form in the Gothic Scriptures of the fourth century,
in which _boka_ = writing, and _bokos_ = things written = books. This is
{3}believed to be derived from the name of the tree we call _beech_ and the
Germans _buche_, because it is supposed that the bark or wood of that tree
was used for cutting runes upon. Similar to this is the Latin _liber_,
which originally meant the inner bark of a tree, and afterwards came to
mean book, because leaves were made from that inner bark for the purpose of
writing. _Diphthera_, in ancient Ionic-Greek, was equivalent to book,
because it meant a polished skin (like parchment or leather) used for
writing upon before the Greeks adopted papyrus (_byblos_, _biblos_) from
the Egyptians. Then the name for papyrus became the name for a book, and
has been retained in modern speech in the word Bible. The word _diphthera_
passed into use among the Persians about five hundred years before Christ,
as the material was borrowed by them from the Ionians for the use of the
scribes who kept the royal records, and it still remains in the speech of
the modern Persians as _defter_ = book. The Hebrew word _sepher_ =
engraving, and is therefore used to designate a book; and the same sense
underlies the Arabic word _Kitab_. Writing was a scratching or incising of
symbols representing sounds (or ideas) upon stone or metal, upon wood, or
bark, or leaves (folia), dressed leather, parchment, papyrus, wax tablets,
and paper.
The form in which the sheets (of skin, parchment, bark, papyrus, or paper)
were gathered, may have been rolls in which they were united to form a
single page, or a square combination of successive leaves united only at
one side. The former was of course the earlier mode, but the latter was
also in use at a remote date. Greek and Roman scribes had evidently begun
to prefer the square fashion during the early days of the Roman empire; and
we may take it to have become the prevalent custom in the fourth century.
Black ink has always been in use for writing, red and blue ink are of
comparatively recent date. The use of gold ink, which was of course so
costly that it could never be otherwise than rare, originated probably when
the empire was as {4}yet unshaken by barbarian inroads; it was, however,
not extinct in Rome during the sixth and seventh centuries, and was
relatively not uncommon at the magnificent court of Byzantium. Late
examples were produced in Gaul for the Frankish princes in the ninth
century; and in these the simple splendour of the Roman style was
embellished with ornamentation chiefly drawn from Irish and Anglo-Saxon
models.
Although people knew how to write and to read more than five thousand years
ago, "a reading public," as we understand the term, came into existence for
the first time in Greece in the fifth century B.C., and again in Rome in
the first century B.C. By this it is meant that there were people who
bought books for the pleasure of reading them, as distinguished from the
class which produced or used books as an official necessity. The
requirements of that reading public among the Greeks, led to the disuse of
skins for the purpose of writing, since only a cheaper and more plentiful
material could satisfy the demand. Egyptian papyrus being both cheap and
plentiful, it was adopted and remained in use for over a thousand years
among the people who spoke Greek and Latin. Books upon vellum or
parchment--_charta pergamena_, an improved form of the old skins--were only
produced occasionally, as luxuries, between the second century B.C. and the
fifth century of our era. At this latter period, the reading public was
extinguished in the revolutions of barbarian conquest, and the cheap
material ceased to be necessary. In the absence of a popular demand for
books, and when only persons of exceptional learning, churchmen, statesmen,
and monks, experienced the need of reading and writing, the supply of
vellum was sufficient, and this dearer material was relatively economical
because of its durability. A reading public can hardly be said to have come
into renewed existence till the fifteenth century, and then once more
vellum was superseded by the cheaper material of paper. Paper, from linen
or rags, had been made in the {5}Saracenic east for several centuries, but
was little used in Europe till the thirteenth century, and was not
fabricated in the west to any considerable extent until the fourteenth
century.
_Writing in Egypt 5000 B.C._
The origin of writing, that is of the art of transmitting information by
means of symbols representing speech, is, like the origin of every other
invention, obscure and uncertain. It is not the proud Aryan, nor his elder
brother the Semite, who can claim the honour of the invention. It belongs
neither to Japhet nor to Shem (convenient eponyms) but to the despised Ham,
with whom they are unwilling to acknowledge kinship. Four thousand years
before Christ (the very period at which, in Milton's opinion, Adam and Eve
were banished from Paradise) the people of the Nile Valley formed a rich
and powerful monarchy, with an old civilisation, and possessed the arts of
painting, sculpture, architecture, and writing. Their writing was chiefly
upon stone monuments, and recorded the deeds of their Kings or the
greatness of their Gods. They also wrote upon leaves of papyrus the forms
of prayer and eulogy which were buried with their dead. Among the surviving
written productions of that great monarchy is a work containing the Moral
Precepts of Ptah-Hotep. Written in the language of Khem (old Egypt), and in
the hieratic character, upon papyrus, it is "the oldest book in the world."
The period of its composition is more ancient than the date of the writing,
which, by internal evidence, has been proved to be over 2000 B.C. It is now
in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and is known by the name of the Papyrus
Prisse. As there can be no question that hieroglyphic writing (engraving)
upon stone was considerably anterior to the evolution of the cursive
hieratic written with pen and ink upon papyrus; and as there is a
hieroglyphic inscription on stone in the Ashmolean Museum {6}which is
assigned to 4000 B.C.--we must infer that the real age of Egyptian writing
is beyond our ken. It must be at the least six thousand years old; and
there are numerous examples in lapidar inscriptions which represent the
millennium preceding the date of the Prisse Papyrus. With this book,
written several centuries before Moses dwelt in the land of Egypt, a sketch
of the history of writing may modestly begin. It must not be imagined that
the dates of Egyptian and Babylonian documents are based upon enthusiastic
conjecture, or upon unaided calculation of the years assigned to the lives
and reigns of monarchs in their newly discovered and deciphered records.
Josephus and Eusebius have preserved fragments of older historical writers,
among them portions of the lost Chronicles of Berossus the Chaldæan and
Manetho the Egyptian, whose works were written in Greek in the fourth and
third centuries before Christ. In former days, when scholars were nurtured
upon the Christian chronology which counted the birth of Christ as A.M.
4004, or A.M. 5870, according as the Hebrew Bible or the Septuagint was
adopted as the authority for dates, it was the custom to deride as fabulous
the immense lists of Chaldean and Egyptian dynasties, which spoiled the
story of Genesis; but the hieroglyphic and the cuneiform monuments have
yielded up their long-buried testimony to justify the discredited
chroniclers. Nothing in romance is more wonderful than the story of the
work of interpretation, by which old Egypt and old Assyria have been
brought forward into the light of authentic history. Two generations of
acute and patient scholars working contemporaneously in England, France,
Germany, and Italy, have contrived, without dictionary, without grammar,
without even a key to the mysterious letters, to decipher and to read the
stony records of those ancient empires. Their first labour was to
distinguish the symbols, and to assign to them a phonetic value, then to
compare the resultant words with the vocabulary of known languages supposed
to be akin to the old {7}ones. In the case of the hieroglyphics, the Coptic
language alone offered its aid, this being the tongue of Egypt as written
and spoken in the first ten centuries of our era, genuine Egyptian indeed,
but necessarily differing enormously from its earliest phases thousands of
years back. As to the cuneiform inscriptions, the various Semitic tongues
furnished means of comparison for Assyrian texts, the Persian and "Zend"
for old Persic and Median, and certain cuneiform vocabularies were
discovered which rendered it possible to understand a third language, the
most ancient of them all, which had been utterly unknown even by name. From
the time of Christ, perhaps even before it, down to sixty years ago, the
languages and monuments of Egypt and Chaldæa had never been looked upon by
the eye of intelligence. The mystery of ages is a mystery no more.
_Writing in Chaldæa, 4000 B.C._
The age of Chaldæan writing (engraving) is not far behind that of the
Egyptian hieroglyphics. It is said that an inscription of the first Sargon,
King of Akkad (in the square or angular character out of which the
wedge-shaped or cuneiform letters were evolved), carries the record back to
3800 B.C. Even if we take a large latitude in discounting the chronology,
there still remains a certainty that the cuneiform character of Babylonia
was used over the greater part of Western Asia from at least 2500 B.C., and
in Persia and its tributaries down to 300 B.C. While, of the Egyptian
writing, we have remains exhibiting all the stages of development, namely
(1) the hieroglyphic, (2) the hieratic, (3) the demotic, (4) the Coptic in
Greek letters; of the cuneiform script we have only the two phases which
may be roughly said to correspond to the Egyptian hieratic and demotic, or
more exactly to two stages of the hieratic. We cannot reconstruct the
original Chaldæan hieroglyphics which must have preceded the Chaldæan
hieratic and {8}cuneiform; nor do we know (at present) of any truly cursive
hand developed from the wedge-letters. Among the relics of the Assyrians is
a great number of stone tablets of small size, containing reports to the
monarch from provincial governors. One of them, now in the British Museum,
is supposed, from a phrase which occurs in it, to show that the stone
tablets were simply copies made for preservation in the archives, while the
actually transmitted originals were written on papyrus. If that were the
practice, and there is inherent probability in the suggestion, there would
assuredly have been a great quantity of papyrus used throughout the
Assyrian empire; yet not a fragment of that material has been discovered.
In the absence of some positive evidence, we can but suppose it likely that
the Assyrians used papyrus (or skins) for writing on, as well as the
Egyptians, but applied it only to temporary purposes, trusting rather to
granite and brick, than to paper or to leather, whatever was intended for
enduring record.
_Progress of the Art, B.C. 2500-1500_
At about 2500 B.C. all the civilisation of the world was confined to the
regions bordering the whole length of the Red Sea, and extending northwards
to Armenia. In the South was Egypt, a powerful monarchy dominant at times
from Ethiopia to Asia Minor, and in the North the Chaldee kingdom of Akkad
dominant over Mesopotamia and the frontier lands. The country of Egypt was
named by its people Keme or Kheme, and their language was called the speech
of Keme (out of which the Hebrews made Ham). The name of Ai-Gupt was given
to the Delta by its Semitic neighbours and inhabitants, while they called
the whole country Mizr (Mizraim) or Misr. The former name has prevailed in
European use, as well as furnished the words Copt and Coptic, although this
is questionable. The Kheme language was written both in hieroglyphic and in
hieratic {9}characters at the year 2500 B.C. The former were the ancient
picture-symbols, which were arranged in vertical columns and read from top
to bottom and from left to right. This practice was retained to the end,
notwithstanding that the Egyptians had been long in contemporaneous
possession of the cursive hieratic characters, written in horizontal lines
from right to left, just as Hebrew and Arabic. The hieratic character was
simply an abridgment of the hieroglyphic, a reduction of the pictorial to
conventional forms.
The two scripts endured side by side till Christianity supervened, and then
the modified Greek alphabet which we call the Coptic came into existence.
The demotic script, a still more cursive reduction of the hieratic, had
come into use probably a thousand years B.C., but it was only used for
private mercantile transactions, and it died out on the establishment of
the Coptic. Examples of both hieroglyphic and demotic writing are given in
the plates accompanying this sketch.
The Akkadian Chaldee language (to be distinguished from the later Semitic
Syro-Chaldee) has, like the Egyptian Khemi, no immediate affinities with
any other important form of speech. They are both of an older type and
stock than the oldest known members of the Aryan and Semitic families. The
Akkadian is called Turanian, as showing undoubted resemblances to the Turki
and Mongol languages of the lands lying north and east of Persia, which
were named by the Persians Turan, as distinguished from Iran. The place of
the Khemi in philology is not so easily defined. It does not seem that any
other language than that of Egypt was ever written in the Egyptian script.
The case is somewhat different with the Chaldee characters. They were
adopted in varying modes for writing Semitic and Aryan languages, as well
as the native Akkadian. This resulted from the blending of populations by
successive conquests. The Akkadian-Chaldees ruled in Mesopotamia till 1500
B.C., when they went down before the Semites from Northern Arabia. {10}A
branch of these Semites had already for a considerable time occupied the
eastern side of Mesopotamia and were in possession of the region round
Nineveh, at the time when their Arabian kindred swept away the old dynasty
that had had its chief seat in Babylonia.
At or about 1300 B.C., the Ninevite Assyrians or Syro-Chaldæans united the
whole of Mesopotamia by conquest, and completed the downfall of the
Akkadian Chaldæans who were thenceforward reduced to servitude. Even the
later uprisings in Babylonia were only the work of princes of Assyrian
blood. The date mentioned is another standpoint in the history of writing.
The Semite Assyrians were now the chief users of the cuneiform script. At
Babylon they seem to have retained it in the same form into which it had
developed in the hands of the Akkad people. At Nineveh, it had undergone a
modification; the combinations of the symbols being considerably altered,
so that one may speak of Babylonian characters and of Assyrian characters
as being two scripts, although they look identical.
_The Semitic Alphabet about 1700 B.C._
This is (in chronological sequence) the place at which mention should be
made of the Greek myth that alphabetical letters were introduced into
Boeotia by Cadmus the Phoenician. It has always been accepted as
substantially true, even by those who knew that Cadmus in Semitic speech
meant simply The Ancient, or The Eastern; and has usually been assigned to
about 1500 B.C. The story requires some modification, and the date is
probably a good deal out of reckoning. Here it is only referred to as
showing the early use of letters by the Phoenicians. There are really no
extant monuments to prove the anteriority of the Semite alphabet to that of
the Greeks, but there can be no question as to the fact. The names of the
Greek letters are manifestly borrowed from a Semitic speech, and the Cadmus
story is in {11}itself a sufficient acknowledgment of the secondary
position of the Hellenes. It is generally held that the Phoenicians derived
their alphabet by means of a selection from the phonetic symbols of the
Egyptian hieratic script. Whether the process was due to the Phoenicians
themselves, is not so clearly asserted. Mr. Maunde Thompson, following
Lenormant and the Vicomte de Rougé, seems to consider that it gradually
took place in Egypt after the Arabs had conquered the country, and when the
Hyksos or Shepherd Kings had established their dynasty (2000 B.C.). During
the five hundred years of their rule there must have been a large Semitic
immigration, and it is not unlikely that the Semitic alphabet was then
derived from the Egyptian for the use of the Syrians and Arabs who dwelt in
Lower Egypt. There is, on the other hand, a modern theory that the Semitic
alphabet was not evolved in this way, but from the hieratic Babylonian
writing. It is true that similarities may be found between them, and it is
also demonstrable that the Greek names of the alphabet were drawn from the
speech, not of Phoenicia or Palestine, but of Aram or Semitic Chaldæa.
Nothing is certain as to the origin of the Semitic alphabet,
notwithstanding the elaborate comparative tables produced by Rougé and
others, beyond the fact that several letters resemble Egyptian (and
Chaldæo-Assyrian) symbols having sometimes the same phonetic value. The
names given to their characters by the Semites are undoubtedly descriptive
of their apparent iconism, and the initial sound of each name is the power
of the letter. This, on the face of it, would imply that the Aramaic
alphabet was an original invention. The Greeks who first received it, must
have been those of Asia Minor, not those of Hellas; and the first
transmitters were neither Arabs, nor Jews, nor Phoenicians, but Babylonian
Aramæans in contact with Cilicia and Cappadocia. The names of the letters,
as sounded by the Syrians of Palestine (Phoenicians, Israelites, Jews),
were: _Aleph_, _Beth_, _Gimel_, _Daleth_, _He_, _Vau_, _Zain_ (_Zai_),
_Hheth_ (_Kheth_), _Teth_, _Yod_, {12}_Caph_, _Lamed_, _Mem_
(_maim_=_waters_), _Nun_, _Samekh_, _Ain_ (_Oin_), _Pe_, _Tsade_, _Koph_,
_Resh_ (=_head_), _Shin_, _Tau_.
We have no actual knowledge of the Chaldæo-Aramaic sounds of these names,
but we know that the Eastern Syrians would probably have written them
thus:--
_Alpha_, _Beta_, _Gamla_, _Dalta_, _He_, _Vau_, _Zaita_, _Hheta_, _Teta_,
_Yoda_, _Kappa_, _Lamda_, _Mu_ (=_water_), _Nun_ (_Nu_), _Samkha_
(_Simkha_=_Sigma_), _Oin_ (_Oi?_), _Pe_, _Tsada_, _Koppa_, _Rash_
(_Ro?_=_face_), _Shen_, _Tau_.
Leaving aside for the present any consideration of the changes and
additions in the Greek alphabet, we may assume that it passed from
Babylonia through Cilicia to the Phrygians and Lydians; and that, whatever
intercourse may have taken place between the European Greeks and the
Phoenicians then or afterwards, the Ionians of Asia Minor had already
formulated the Hellenic alphabet before it reached the Thebans. As it seems
to be nearly certain that the Phrygians possessed it in the tenth century
before Christ, the Aramæans must have had it much earlier, and we may
credit them with the use of writing as far back as 1300-1200 B.C. It is
very unlikely that the Western Syrians were far behind, but the oldest
monuments extant go no higher than the tenth century, and are probably
surpassed in antiquity by some of the Sabæan (Himyarite or Homerite)
inscriptions of Southern Arabia. The Himyari alphabet, which is the direct
ancestor of the modern Abyssinian, introduces some novel forms, and has
less resemblance to the Aramaic original than any of the others. Most of
the letters are, however, ultimately traceable to the Aramaic, although the
date must have been remote, to judge from the large divergences in shape
which had had time to develop themselves before the type was fixed.
About, or soon after, 1000 B.C., we find a considerable portion of the
earth's surface occupied by people knowing how to write; namely, Egypt,
Nubia, Abyssinia, Arabia, the whole of Asia Minor, Syria, Babylonia,
Assyria, Armenia, {13}and China. Abyssinia and Armenia are included because
into the one country Egyptian and Himyaritic characters had been imported,
and into the other a form of Babylonian. China is placed in the list, far
below her pretensions, because we do not really know the age of the
character in which Chinese books preserve the inscriptions of Yu. It
appears derivable from the dissertations of M. Terrien, whose sagacious
learning has attracted many scholars, that the earliest history recorded in
Chinese annals is not geographically Chinese; but that it represents the
legends and traditions which were carried into China by the ancestors of
the race. A connexion has been found to subsist between those traditions
and the early history of Babylonia, which leads to the inference that the
Akkadian people of 3800 B.C. and the ancestors of the Chinese were at one
time united. Assuming that the theory is justifiable, we may treat the
Chinese in China as having inherited the art of writing, however strangely
altered in form. It is probably true that they used the letters out of
which their present characters descended, in the country they now inhabit,
at more than 1000 B.C.
_The Alphabet in European Greece, 800 B.C._
The European Greeks are not included in the preceding paragraph, simply
because there are no means of proving that they had the use of letters in
the tenth century B.C. The probability, however, is that they were not far
behind their brethren in Asia Minor. The variations in the forms of some of
the letters of the Greek alphabet which are found in inscriptions at
different places both in Asia Minor and in Greece, are attributable to
local fashions and to the fact that the script was not built up all at once
from a single model. It is here that the tradition about Cadmus has its
chief significance; for there can be little doubt that the alphabet of
Tyre, not quite identical with its elder Aramaic {14}sister, had some
immediate influence in modifying the forms borrowed by the Boeotians from
the Ionians. The older Greek alphabet has been already mentioned. It was
found after a while to be both insufficient and more than sufficient. The
Tsade (ts) and Koppa (q) were not needed in Greek, and were only retained
formally as numerals. As most Greek organs could only give the same sound
(s) to both the _simkha_ and the _shen_ (which they called _sigma_ and
_san_), one of the two names was superfluous. So they kept the symbol for
_shen_ as an _s_, but transferred to it the name of the _simkha_. The
symbol of the latter they retained in its place, but sounded it as ks, and
called it _Ksi_, a name which did not badly suit the original Semitic sound
of the letter which was like _hs_ rather than _s_. The unaspirated _He_
they called _mere E_ (_E psilon_); to the aspirated Heta, they left its
name, but regarded it as _aspirated E_. Its original Semitic value as an
aspirate (adaptable to any vowel) was not wholly lost sight of, and this
idea of its power survived the stage at which H had become nothing more
than _ê_ or _ee_. The necessity of making aspirated letters led to the
prefixing or over-writing of the _H_, at first in its full size, then (so
as to avoid confusion with Eta) in small, then in half shape, thus |-. This
custom produced its complement in the shape of -|, to mark the soft
breathing; until in the eleventh century of our era, the two breathings
were worn down into semicircular form, thus ( , ). Another rejected symbol
was the _vau_, formed like the letter F and sounded like our V. It dropped
out of usage, and they forgot its name, although it had been considerably
used by the old poets, in connexion with whom it is usually named
_digamma_, because of its resemblance to a double gamma, or one gamma
superimposed on another. It was found necessary to have a character for
_u_, and advantageous to use single symbols for double letters frequently
occurring, such as _ph_, _kh_, _ps_ and _oo_ (long o). The old Eastern form
of _vau_ supplied the _u_; in fact, having dropped the letter as a
consonant out of its sixth place in {15}the alphabet, they put it in its
vowel-character at the end. The symbol of the discarded _koppa_ was used
for the _Ph_, which was not equivalent in sound to our _ph_, but must have
resembled the German _pf_. The discarded _tsada_ (a trident) was used to
represent, in some places _ps_, in others _kh_, but finally the symbol fell
into two distinct forms, by being written upright as + ([psi]) and leaning
sidewise as × ([chi]). By the time of Herodotus the Greek alphabet may be
considered as having reached exactly its present form in capital letters.
The cursive hand which must have existed at all times of Greek writing was
simply a rapid deformation of the capitals, and consequently did not attain
to any uniformly distinctive character till much later. The general use of
minuscules in any such uniform type is always referred to the eighth
century after Christ, but really there is no essential change of form
between the cursive letters a hundred years before Christ and those of a
thousand years after Christ. The chief difference is in the greater freedom
and fluency of the late letters, an air of practised familiarity which is
lacking in the earlier cursive.
_Writing in Italy from 700 to 100 B.C._
The Greeks and the Phoenicians had a similar aptitude for establishing
colonies abroad to that which the English have shown during the past three
centuries. Thus the coast line of the Mediterranean from Tripoli to
Morocco, and from Sicily and Southern Italy to Spain and Gaul, was dotted
with Punic and Greek settlements created for purely commercial purposes,
but gaining an independent importance as time went on. The chief seat of
Phoenician domination was at Carthage; of Greek nationality at Syracuse,
Cumæ (near Naples), and Marseilles. The age at which those colonies
acquired political greatness may be roughly set down as in the fourth
century before Christ, but it is sufficient for our purpose to know that
they had been founded considerably {16}earlier; and that the art of writing
had been carried westward as far back at least as the seventh or eighth
century B.C. It was virtually the one alphabet, applied by various races to
their various languages, which was used at Carthage and Cadiz, at
Marseilles and in Sicily and Italy, in the seventh century B.C. Italy was
occupied by several distinct sets of people. The Umbrians, Latins, and
Oscans occupied all the middle of the peninsula; the Pelasgic tribes who
were in the heel and toe of the geographical boot were nearly Grecised; the
Etruscans held Tuscany, and Celts occupied Lombardy. Mommsen thought that
the Greek alphabet had reached the Italians more than 1300 years before
Christ; but a more modest estimate will be safer. It was probably about
seven hundred years B.C. when the Etrurians received their alphabet from
the Greeks; and there is no reason for thinking, as Mommsen implies, that
their first contact with Greek letters had been elsewhere than in Italy.
The alphabet reached them no doubt from Cumæ, as it did the Latins, and
there was sufficient variation in the practice of the Greek colonies in
Italy to account for the differences which mark Etruscan, Umbrian, and
Latin writing.
_Roman Writing._
The usual date of the founding of Rome is undoubtedly correct or nearly so.
It was about the middle of the eighth century B.C., and the rapid
enlargement of the new Latin town on the Tiber, produced by the influx of
settlers into a trade emporium with waterway, must have led to an early use
of writing. This indicates something like 700 B.C. for the period of the
extension of that art over the whole of Italy. The custom of writing from
right to left and left to right in alternate lines was retained for several
centuries among the various Italic peoples, but the Latins seem to have
been the first to adopt the Greek modification by which {17}the letters
took their permanent shape from the left-right sequence. In several Greek
towns, the old [GAMMA] was replaced by a C (the result of a cursive mode of
writing), and the triangular [DELTA] had its second and third lines
represented by a single curve. The [PI] was still a [Symbol: P not
connected in the middle], and the P had a little stroke added to it
([Symbol: R with short tail]) for the sake of distinction. The Sigma was
commonly written [Symbol: reverse tilted Z] instead of [Symbol: reverse 3]
([SIGMA]). The Latins omitted of course such letters as they found
superfluous (_z_, _th_, _k_, _ph_, _ch_, _ps_, and _oo_), but were
naturally bound to retain letters already becoming superfluous to the
Greeks (F, Q). The third letter of the alphabet was used for both K and G;
but later, when the need of some differentiation became felt, the useless Z
was replaced by a second C to which a tail was added ([Symbol: C with
diagonal tail]). The Eta (or Heta) was made to retain its earliest function
as a strong breathing (H), although the Greeks were treating it as no more
than EE. The Greek confusion between the symbols for _ks_, _ps_, and _ch_,
affected the Latins so far that one of the three letters, _i.e._ X, was
taken to represent the only sound of the three which their language needed,
namely _ks_; and this being an afterthought, it was put at the end of the
alphabet. Thus in the second century B.C. the Romans had their alphabet
completely formed in the capital shapes, and with the phonetic values,
which it thenceforward retained. The letters were A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H,
I, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, the F being sounded probably as our V
and F, the V as our U and W. It was long afterwards that the F was
restricted to the sound of English F, and V as a consonant took the sound
of English V (instead of W.) The Q was a more guttural letter than the C
originally, but afterwards lost its distinctiveness of utterance. When it
became fashionable to learn and quote Greek, in the time of Cicero and
after, the letters [KAPPA], [UPSILON], and [ZETA] were reinserted in the
Latin alphabet for form's sake, as K, Y, Z. It was not till the sixteenth
century that, in the northern countries of Europe, the letter J was evolved
from the black letter form {18}of I ([Symbol: blackletter I]) and the
letter V split into U and V. As for the W, it was needed only by Germanic
people, and was consequently a late intruder into the modern Roman
alphabet.
_Indian Writing about 300 B.C._
To return to the East, the first examples of native Indian writing appeared
in the rock-inscribed decrees of Asoka, found in various places over the
north of India, from the Indus to the Ganges, and even in the Dekkan; which
can be dated between 250 and 230 B.C. The language is Prakrit or Pali, the
characters (although at first sight they seem an independent script) were
derived like so many others from the Semitic system, and the nearest of the
parallel types is the alphabet of the Himyarite inscriptions. The Sabæan
monarchy which ruled over Southern Arabia a thousand years B.C. had had
large commercial relations with India, and it was probably from that source
that the people of Bombay and the North-West acquired the art of writing,
how long before Asoka it would be difficult to learn. Out of the simple
forms of Asoka's alphabet all the modern scripts of Indian native writing
descended, including the artificial and elaborate Nagari alphabet which is
one of the latest of them.
_Writing in Central Asia from 300 B.C._
In the kingdom of Bactria, the coins of the kings who from about 150 B.C.
followed the older Greek princes, bear inscriptions in Indian Prakrit, but
not written in the same character as was used by Asoka. The two scripts
differ so much in appearance not only from all others, but also between
themselves, that one does not easily recognise the fact that they both must
have been of Himyaritic origin. They are very different from the Pehlvi
which was used by Parthian sovereigns in the second century after Christ,
and by the Sassanide kings in the fourth. The {19}Pehlvi had been evolved
from the later Aramean, and must have been in use in Persia before the time
of Alexander; but the existing specimens are all subsequent to the
beginning of the Christian era. And as for the script which is called Zend,
and which is used for writing the Zoroastrian books of the most ancient
Persian language, there is nothing to prove that it is not of much later
invention than the Pehlvi.
_Oriental Letters after the beginning of the Christian Era_
_Samaria._--The writing of Palestine was probably identical originally with
that of the Phoenicians, and the Samaritan script, which is still in use
for biblical purposes, has retained to the present day a considerable
resemblance with that of Tyre and Sidon. The expatriation and partial
repatriation of the Jews and Israelites during the seventh and sixth
centuries B.C., had the effect of leaving only a small remnant in the north
of the land who preserved their ancient writing. From that time to this
some of the descendants of the Samarians have continued to write their
Pentateuch (which for them is the whole of the Bible) in the ancient
characters of the Hebrew language (a specimen is found on plate 4). All the
rest of the Jews, in whatever part of the world they may have been, have
retained the square character (with its various Rabbinical modifications)
which they learned in Chaldæa in the seventh century B.C. But the Hebrew
language never returned to the Holy Land. Hebrew, as spoken among the
Samaritans, underwent the same Aramaisation as the language of the Judæans,
and from three or four centuries B.C. down to the eighth century of our
era, the language of all Syria was Syriac with local dialects, and Greek in
the great cities. The usual character in which Syriac was written has
already been mentioned, but the Samaritans wrote even their semi-Syriac
speech in the old {20}characters of their Bible; and there is a really
Samaritan Pentateuch--different from the Hebrew Pentateuch in Samaritan
letters--which corresponds in Samaritan literature to the Chaldee Targums
of the Jews. None of the Hebraeo-Aramaic dialects long survived in Syria
the conquest of the Arabs. Syriac still lived on in Western Persia and in
Mongolia, and in India for a time, but only survived as a dead liturgical
language. Chaldæo-Hebraic made its way westwards to Morocco, Italy, Spain
and Gaul. The faithful in Samaria, now nearly extinct, clung to their
Pentateuch and their religion through all vicissitudes, and have never
ceased to write the Bible in the Hebrew script of ancient Palestine.
_Arabia._--Arabian writing before the time of Mohammad is only known to us
under the name of Haurani and Nabathæan in the North, of Himyaritic in the
South. None of these scripts resembles the Islamic characters called
distinctively Arabic. The Gospel-script (Estrangelo) of the Syrians is the
nearest of all the Aramaic hands to that used by the earliest Mohammadans,
which (from its special cultivation in the town of Cufa) is called Cufic.
But even here, the resemblance is not so close as to make it improbable
that there was a link between them in some lost script of pre-Christian
days. The Cufic writing which prevailed for three centuries as the mode of
writing the Koran cannot strictly be shown to be the mother of the Naskhi
which replaced it and has flourished for a thousand years. It is clearly
older than the Naskhi in its forms, but the Naskhi has been proved to have
existed contemporaneously with the Cufic almost from the beginning of
Mohammadanism. After the third century of the Hijra, the Cufic was only
retained for ornamentation and head-lines. By that time the Arab conquests
had created a vast Mohammadan empire; the Syrians, the Persians, and the
Egyptians were obliged to give up their old scripts, and to accept that of
their conquerors. Arabic writing occupied not only all {21}the seats in
which Phoenician letters had been used fifteen centuries before, but even a
far larger area. The writing and the language were used and known from
Seville to the frontiers of India. Soon after, India likewise fell a prey;
and Arabic letters have been used there ever since by the Mohammadan
population. The elegant script called Talik, which was peculiar to the
Persians (but has been borrowed in India), was developed in the fourteenth
century. It differs little, except in gracefulness, from the typical
Naskhi.
_India and the further East._--The characters in which the Pracrit
inscriptions of Northern India were engraved on stone, in the third century
B.C., descended, with considerable modifications of form, to the various
tribes of Hindus who developed the modern languages of India, now called
Hindi, Gujarati, Mahratti, Panjabi, Bengali. All these languages are akin,
their differences being produced by segregation and by local contact with
aboriginal or foreign populations. Their character two thousand years ago
(before local diversities were perpetuated in names) is described by the
term Prakrit (=Natural) as distinguished from the title given to another
form of the language, namely Sanskrit (=Artificial) which is believed to
represent a far more ancient stage of Indian speech. In this artificial
language the earliest traditions and literature of the Hindo-Aryan race are
preserved, but it is supposed to have died out of speech (if ever it was
spoken) several centuries before the Christian era. However that may be, we
have no monument or record to show that it was written till the tenth
century after Christ, and the Sanscrit alphabet is undeniably not more than
eight or nine centuries old, having been artificially elaborated from the
much simpler script of Asoka's time.
The graphic systems of Southern India, Ceylon, Thibet, Burma, and Siam were
all derived from the script of Aryan India after Budhism had begun to
spread.
{22}In North-Eastern Asia, the Mongolian script (and out of it, the
Manchurian) were formed from the writing of the Nestorian Christians who
carried their Syriac books to the frontiers of China.
_Spain and Gaul under the Romans_
It has been already said that Punic settlements were made in Spain probably
as far back as the seventh century B.C. To the Phoenicians or Carthaginians
we may ascribe the introduction of letters and their application to coins
and inscriptions, not only in the Punic language of the men who held Cadiz,
Carthagena, and Barcelona, but also in the Iberian and Celtiberian language
of native princes. Strabo says that the Turdetani (of the present
Andalusia) boasted the possession of historical and poetical books of
immense age in their own language; but when he was writing, about the time
of the birth of Christ, they were all Romanised and unable to speak any
other tongue than Latin. There exists, however, a great quantity of coins
struck in Spain between 400 B.C. and the time of Augustus. There are three
varieties (omitting those of Greek colonies in Aragon), namely, those in
Punic language and Punic letters, those with Iberian names in Punic
letters, and those with Celtiberian names in modified Punic letters. The
later Iberian and Celtiberian have sometimes Latin inscriptions added to
the native ones. In the first century after Christ, the whole of Spain was
virtually Romanised. The Transalpine Gauls retained their own speech longer
than the Spaniards did theirs, because the conquest was later; but the
people of Cisalpine Gaul were Romanised even earlier than the Spaniards.
The independence of Marseilles as a Greek republic came to an end in the
first century of the Roman empire, and the Greek language probably died out
in a few generations. Then, no doubt, Roman letters took the place of the
Greek, which, as Cæsar said, were used by the Gauls in his time.
Henceforward, till the fifth century, Spain and {23}Gaul were simply
outlying provinces of the empire, without anything in literature or
calligraphy to distinguish their people from the Romanised Italians. It was
not till the sixth century, when the Gothic kingdom had become a stable
institution, that anything like a local fashion of calligraphy began to
develop itself in Spain. Gaul was similarly affected by the influx first of
the Visigoths, then of the Franks.
_Influence of the Bible upon writing_
The events which led to the compilation of the Gospels were of the greatest
moment in the history of writing. The educational influence of the
Bible--apart entirely from its claims to supernatural importance--in
spreading the use of letters and creating schools for the study of reading
and writing, has been incalculable. The historical and religious traditions
of the Jews would probably have had but little effect upon the world, if
the result of the various wars by which Syria was so often desolated had
not been to expatriate the chosen people of the Lord. A large Jewish
population occupied Northern Egypt at the time when Alexander's conquests
revolutionised the old world. The establishment of Greek dynasties in that
country and in Syria speedily Hellenised the upper classes and the citizens
in both; and the linguistic subjugation of the Jews in Egypt was even more
complete than that of their old masters. Their peculiar condition
facilitated a change; for while they possessed the sacred book of the Law
of their forefathers in a language that had been dead for centuries, they
had only translations in the language of the country of their former exile
(Chaldæa); and though they had the commercial qualification of
bilingualism, their Chaldee and their Egyptian were probably equally weak.
Two generations were enough to Hellenise them, and seventy years after
Alexander's death, the Bible was introduced to the knowledge of the Greek
world in an edition destined to render the old Hebrew {24}scripture
intelligible to Egyptian and Syrian Jews. This fortunate circumstance drew
a number of people into the Elohistic fold who would never otherwise have
been found there; and had no small influence in bringing about the social
and moral revolution which signalised the beginning of our era.