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ARTICLE VII.

ON THE EARLY HISTORY OF OUR ALPHABET.

BY PRESIDENT CHARLES W. SUPER, ATHENS, OHIO.

PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES CONSulted.

Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East, London, 1883.

Rawlinson and Gilman, History of Ancient Egypt, New York, 1887.
Roberts, Introduction to Greek Epigraphy, London, 1887.

Taylor, The Alphabet, 2 vols., London, 1883.

Kirchhoff, Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets, Berlin, 1877. Clermont-Ganneau, Un chapitre de l'histoire de l'A B C In Mélanges Graux, Paris, 1884.

Wuttke, Entstehung der Schrift, Leipzig, 1872.

Faulmann, Illustrirte Geschichte der Schrift, Wien, 1880.

Hinrichs, Griechische Epigraphik, Nördlingen, 1885.

Fabretti, Palaeographische Studien, Leipzig, 1877.
Melzer, Geschichte der Carthager, Berlin, 1879.
McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia.

THE object of this essay is to place before those who may chance to read it a succinct statement of the known facts relating to the rise and development of our alphabet. We are not yet quite in position to write a history of the most important of all civilizing arts; but, to judge from current indications, we are not far from the time when a history of writing will be easily possible. Busy hands directed by trained intellects are at work in nearly all the lands that border on the Mediterranean, the Euphrates, the Tigris, bringing to light the records on which such a history must be based; and it is probable that before the end of the present century so much epigraphic material will have been accumulated and lucidly arranged that we shall be as well in

formed upon this as upon any other important subject pertaining to antiquity. None surely surpasses it in interest.

To us children of the nineteenth century no progress seems possible without written records. Pen and pencil are in such constant requisition as to be well-nigh indispensable to any vocation. What we shall do to-morrow depends in no small measure upon the recorded transactions of to-day; and we trust the unaided memory to a very limited extent to tell us what transpired last year or even last week. The spelling-book is the foundation-stone of our civilization and it, to continue the figure, rests upon the alphabet. Yet there are extensive literatures not founded on an alphabet. Wuttke devotes a volume of eight hundred octavo pages to the study of those systems of writing that are without an alphabet. And the contest that raged so fiercely among classical scholars, for more than half a century, over the question whether the art of writing was known in the time of Homer, abundantly proves that, in the opinion of many men of intelligence, the highest achievements in the poetic art are possible without the aid of writing, and conditioned wholly upon the strength of the human memory. The practice of writing has become a second nature to us. Countless things which we could remember with a little effort we commit to paper because it requires less. The spoken word, the written word, and the thing signified are to most of us easily interchangeable terms. We have become so accustomed to associate the name of an object as it looks on paper with the object itself, that few people realize the relation to be wholly artificial. But there is absolutely no natural connection between the familiar words "pen" and "book," for instance, and these articles of common use. This becomes evident when we consider for a moment that they have a thousand different names in so many different languages, which must therefore be written in a thousand different ways. Yet the objects themselves remain the same. The pictorial

representation of a book will readily recall its image to the mind of the beholder if he has ever seen the thing, book, before; but it will only suggest the name or names by which he formerly knew it. It does not tell him what it is called in a language that he has yet to learn.

The earliest mode of writing was pictorial delineation in some rude form. This hardly deserves the name of writing, but it occupied the place that was afterward much better filled by writing proper. It was very inaccurate and insufficient, suited only to tribes in the lowest social condition. No mental processes can be represented by it and for all abstract ideas it is wholly inadequate. There is no doubt, however, that pictorial symbols continued to be used for a considerable time after the inadequacy of this mode of representation had begun to be realized. Paintings in the Etruscan and Egyptian tombs seem to prove that the pictorial art had reached a fair degree of advancement before alphabetic writing was used at all.

The problem that presented itself to the minds of those persons who were not satisfied to follow tradition unreflectingly was, how to represent to the eye the names of objects as well as things, and mental processes as well as material objects. It was to invent a system of graphic symbols that would represent physical entities as embodied in the sounds of the human voice. While the number of sounds which the human voice is capable of producing is infinite, those that are used in speech are relatively small in the civilized languages, and were originally smaller. An arbitrary symbol to represent a simple sound would therefore seem to be an invention which a person of ordinary capacity could make. But experience shows that, as in the case of Columbus, what is very easy when once done may be impossible to any but the greatest minds. Until the age and the man appear together, the deed remains undone, the discovery unmade.

The difficulties to be overcome in the invention of an

alphabet were of a peculiar nature. The traditional mode of making records had become invested with a sanctity which placed almost insuperable obstacles in the way of innovation. Where a people had adopted a policy of isolation, like the Chinese, and this seems to have been universally the case in primitive times, it made demands upon the existing graphic system which it was very poorly fitted to supply. It was as if, when the expansion of society created new wants from time to time, it had compelled each artisan to learn all the trades necessary to supply these wants, instead of resorting to a wise division of labor, that should require of each individual only the doing of the few things which he could do well. Where the use of a graphic system fell into the hands of a special class, as would almost of necessity be the case where it required a long apprenticeship, this class would naturally resist change. To approve it would be to endanger their craft.

Arguing from the analogies of the case, it seems probable that the inventor of the alphabet was acquainted with at least one foreign language. While it is true that a person of reflective mind could hardly help noticing the frequent recurrence of simple sounds in his native tongue, and might even ascertain that the whole number of elementary sounds entering into it was not large, yet it is hardly probable that he would venture to make any practical use of this discovery. All ancient mythologies attribute the invention of writing to a god; the achievement was regarded as transcending human capacity, and no mortal would sacrilegiously propose changes, even though they would be manifest improvements. We need ask for no stronger evidence of the tenacity with which men hold to traditional forms in language than that furnished by the English-speaking people. Though ready and eager to welcome almost any innovation that promises to save time and money, they persistently adhere to the most wretched system of spelling, and will hear to no improvements in their

method of writing, simply because they have a quasi-superstitious dread of breaking with the past in a matter of this kind. This feeling, though not founded in reason, is founded in man's nature, and it is not difficult to see how, in the remote past, the thought of change would be as little entertained as its realization would be regarded possible.

The acquisition of a foreign language enables one to regard his own from a point of view which is philosophically of great advantage. Neither would he be restrained by religious scruples from making any use of the newly acquired language that he saw fit. The solution of the difficulty which philosophy shows to be intrinsically the most probable, history and tradition represent as having been actually made. It is the almost unanimous testimony of antiquity that the Phoenicians invented the alphabet after they had obtained a knowledge of the Egyptian system of graphic representation. Of this remarkable people, Professor Sayce says: "They lacked originality, but they were gifted beyond most other races with the power of assimilating and combining, of adapting and improving on their models. Phoenician art derives its origin from Babylonia, from Egypt, and in later times from Assyria. The Phoenicians were the most skilful workmen of the ancient world. But the most precious acquisition of the Phoenicians was the alphabet. This was borrowed by the settlers in Caphtor or the Delta from their Egyptian neighbors in the time of the Middle Empire, or the early days of the Hyksos dominion-all the encumbrances of the Egyptian system of writing being discarded by a people who possessed the practical habits of traders and merchants. It soon found its way to the mother-country, where the Egyptian names of the letters were replaced by native ones drawn possibly from an older script now termed Hittite, and from the mother-country it was disseminated through the western world." This statement represents in its main features the almost unanimous testimony of the

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