I have told you how the Egyptians preserved speech by means of little
figures. I have described the wedge-shaped signs which served the people
of Mesopotamia as a handy means of transacting business at home
and abroad.
But how about our own alphabet? From whence came those compact little
letters which follow us throughout our life, from the date on our birth
certificate to the last word of our funeral notice? Are they Egyptian or
Babylonian or Aramaic or are they something entirely different? They are
a little bit of everything, as I shall now tell you.
Our modern alphabet is not a very satisfactory instrument for the
purpose of reproducing our speech. Some day a genius will invent a new
system of writing which shall give each one of our sounds a little
picture of its own. But with all its many imperfections the letters of
our modern alphabet perform their daily task quite nicely and fully as
well as their very accurate and precise cousins, the numerals, who
wandered into Europe from distant India, almost ten centuries after the
first invasion of the alphabet. The earliest history of these letters,
however, is a deep mystery and it will take many years of painstaking
investigation before we can solve it.
This much we know--that our alphabet was not suddenly invented by a
bright young scribe. It developed and grew during hundreds of years out
of a number of older and more complicated systems.
In my last chapter I have told you of the language of the intelligent
Aramaean traders which spread throughout western Asia, as an
international means of communication. The language of the Phoenicians
was never very popular among their neighbors. Except for a very few
words we do not know what sort of tongue it was. Their system of
writing, however, was carried into every corner of the vast
Mediterranean and every Phoenician colony became a center for its
further distribution.
It remains to be explained why the Phoenicians, who did nothing to
further either art or science, hit upon such a compact and handy system
of writing, while other and superior nations remained faithful to the
old clumsy scribbling.
The Phoenicians, before all else, were practical business men. They did
not travel abroad to admire the scenery. They went upon their perilous
voyages to distant parts of Europe and more distant parts of Africa in
search of wealth. Time was money in Tyre and Sidon and commercial
documents written in hieroglyphics or Sumerian wasted useful hours of
busy clerks who might be employed upon more useful errands.
When our modern business world decided that the old-fashioned way of
dictating letters was too slow for the hurry of modern life, a clever
man devised a simple system of dots and dashes which could follow the
spoken word as closely as a hound follows a hare.