Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/147

Rh ought to place the Phœnicians nearly on a par with their brothers, the Hebrews and Arabs, in the history of progress,—our alphabet. You know that the characters which we now use are, through a thousand transformations, the same with which the Shemites first expressed the sounds of their language. The Greek and Latin alphabets, from which our European alphabets are all derived, are no other than the Phœnician alphabet. Phonetic writing, that luminous idea of expressing each articulation by a sign, and reducing these articulations to a small number—twenty-two,—was an invention of the Shemites. But for them, we should, perhaps, still be draggling on painfully with hieroglyphics. It may, therefore, be said, in one sense, that the Phœnicians, whose literature has so unhappily entirely disappeared, have thus fixed the essential condition to all firm and precise exercise of thought.

But I hasten to pass on, gentlemen, to the chief service which the Shemitic race