GREEK PAPYRI
The Greeks succeeded to the sovereignty of the sea after they had
driven the Phœnicians from the Ægean. They were skilful shipbuilders
and navigators, and their maritime enterprise, in which, as has been
shown, they preceded the Phœnicians, 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 Ionians 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 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 Græcia 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 Mæso-Gothic, Albanian, &c." (Taylor, ii. 125.)
Palæography, or the decipherment of documents, 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 with the _Papyrus Prisse_ and the
_Book of the Dead_, 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 Æschylus, 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 conquest 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 _ostraca_, 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 example eighteen
hundred years old: "Chæron requests your company at dinner at the table
of Lord Serapis in the Serapæum 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 doubtless formed a portion of the
library of one Lucius Piso Cæsonius, 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 palæographic 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 rolls of papyrus were found in Egypt, probably in
the Fayum. Of these only one, containing a list of peasants employed
in the corvée, 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 discovered
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 two valuable relics came to light in fragments
of Plato's _Phædo_ and the lost _Antiope_ of Euripides. Then followed
the discovery of another lost work, Aristotle's Αθηναίων Πολιτεία;
of the _Mimes_ of Herodas--an almost unknown writer of the Alexandrian
age--part of another oration of Hyperides; a long 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 countless centuries. The emotions which Herodas delineates
are not Greek, but human, and no preliminary cramming in archæology is
necessary for their appreciation. As the world was never young, so it
will never grow old. The archæologist devotes years of research to
compiling a picture of Greek life, and the result is _Charicles_--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
archæologists." (_Nineteenth Century_, Nov. 1891, p. 748.) Here is one
scene by which Mr. Whibley justifies his appreciation. The _dramatis
personæ_ 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 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 goddess, 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 I 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. Threissa, 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 civilities the quarrel is brought
to an end.
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 _Sayings_, 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 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 temptation 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 inscriptions 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,
and 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 life, so closely resembling our own, whereby, too, we learn how
superficial have been the changes in human nature throughout the ages
of man's tenancy of the earth.
THE DIFFUSION OF THE "PHŒNICIAN" ALPHABET
In the remaining pages the course of the history of the Phœnician
alphabet, as we may for convenience still call it, must now be
outlined, and for this purpose the following table, an abstract of that
given in Canon Isaac Taylor's _History of the Alphabet_ (i. 81), is a
convenient guide.
The several alphabets, it will be seen, are grouped under three
principal heads: (_a_) ARAMEAN, whence most of the alphabets
of Western Asia are derived; (_b_) SABÆAN, the source of the
alphabets of India; and (_c_) HELLENIC, the source of the
alphabets of Europe.
/---------------------------- Phœnician. ---------------------------\
/------------------ Sabæan. ------------\
/---------- Indian. -----------\
Hellenic. Dravidian. Nagari. Pali. Ethiopic. Aramean.
Greek. Tamil. Tibetan. Burmese. Amharic. Hebrew.
Latin. Telugu. Kashmiri. Siamese. Syriac.
Russian. Canarese. Gujarati. Javanese. Mongolian.
Coptic. Marathi. Singalese. Arabic.
Bengali. Corean. Pehlevi.
Malayan. Armenian.
Georgian.
(_a_) ARAMEAN, so called from "Aram," the hilly district of
Mesopotamia, became, from 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: (1) 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. Condemned 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 its supersession by Arabic on the spread
of Mohammedanism. (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 probably 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
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 supplied by Egyptian and Assyrian records, as shown in the
following figures:--
[Illustration: EGYPTIAN NUMERATION]
[Illustration: ASSYRIAN NUMERATION]
We have examples of the use of letters in their "abecedarian" or
acrostic order in the sections of the one hundred and nineteenth and
one hundred and forty-fifth Psalms, which bear the letters of the
Hebrew alphabet, and in the books of the _Iliad_, which bear the
letters of the Greek alphabet. That alphabet also supplies illustration
of the acrologic method, as _e.g._ Π = Πέντε, for 5; Δ = Δέκα, for
10; H (the old sign for the rough breathing in Ἑκατον), for 100; X =
Ξίλιοι, for 1000; Π with Λ (= 5 x 10) inscribed in it standing for 50.
A more ingenious method was adopted by both Greeks and Hebrews in the
division of the alphabet into three groups: the first to represent
units; the second, tens; and the third, hundreds. The use of "Arabic"
numerals, besides encountering opposition at the start, was limited
until the fifteenth century to the paging of books and mathematical
formulæ, but their convenience as compared with the cumbrous Roman
figures won them general adoption. Their stages of modification
were pictorially suggested by Canon Taylor in a communication to
the _Academy_ 28th January 1882, from which the table on p. 212 is
borrowed, but the question of origin remains unsettled.
An age to which, more than to its predecessors, with their more sedate
lives, "time is money," may appreciate what service they wrought who
invented the few numerals, the relative places of which serve the
purpose of recording the commerce of the world. But perhaps the greater
admiration is due to the genius which devised the nought or cipher
(Arab. _sifr_, "empty"), without which the labour of calculation and
recording would have taxed energy beyond endurance.
The (5) _Pehlevi_, (6) _Armenian_, and (7) _Georgian_ alphabets are
derived from the Aramean group through the Persian or Iranian. The
Pehlevi has abiding interest as the script of the sacred books of
the Zend or Parsi religion; but the Armenian and Georgian, with the
addition of three or four Greek letters, are bereft of significance
except as the surviving representatives of the ancient Persian. The
Indo-Bactrian alphabet should have reference here as of Iranian
descent, and especially because it is the script of the famous edicts
of Asoka, the first royal Buddhist convert, inscribed on a rock near
Peshawar.
[Illustration: Arabic Ciphers-page 212]
(_b_) The Sabæan (from "Sheba") or Himyaritic (from Himyar, the
eponymous hero of the Himyarites) group is classed among South Semitic
alphabets. The early alphabet of Abyssinia, called Ethiopic or Amharic,
is derived from it, and, wherein lies its main importance, also the
alphabets of India, the number of which, comprising more than half of
the alphabets now in use, would, in detailed treatment, "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 Phœnician 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 characters, 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, were made slowly and almost imperceptibly, "descent
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 (1) _Greek_, (2) _Russian_,
(3) _Coptic_, (4) _Latin_.
(1) _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 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 Phœnician 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 alphabets, while the
Chalcidian gave birth to the alphabets of Western Europe.
(2) _Russian._--A quaint and probably trustworthy 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 Slavonians, and sent them St.
Constantine, the Philosopher, called Cyril, a just and true 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 reduced,
the Russian remains the most cumbersome and ungainly of alphabets.
(3) _Coptic_, or, more correctly, the Coptic script of Egypt under
the Romans. Notwithstanding the advent of Cæsar Augustus as Prefect
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 throughout
Mohammedan countries, Arabic has supplanted 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) _Latin._--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 Eubœa, an
island of the Ægean, 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 introduction 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 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 (_i_, _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 _g_, 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.
[Illustration: FINAL LATIN AND GREEK FORMS COMPARED WITH THEIR
PROTOTYPES IN THE OLDER ALPHABETS]
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 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 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. "No Irish hand is
known out of which it could have 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 mediæval 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
cultivated as a calligraphic script in the Irish monasteries, which at
this time enjoyed comparative 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 Northumbria, 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 manuscripts, 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 the Caroline minuscule (see p.
37). Here, however, 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 Phœnicians, and their names are based on the same principle
as that of the Latin. Running our eye down the table we note that our
alphabet 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 characters from the Runic, Þ = w, named _wen_, and Þ = 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 _y^e_, with consequent mispronunciation of that word by
those who see it thus changed. Both Y and Z were late importations 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 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 foreigners), 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 distinguish 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 handwriting 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.
[Illustration: GENEALOGY OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.]