Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/22

8 times as difficult to recognise, as it is to discern at the first glance the connection between the stately, clustered pier and richly sculptured capital of the Gothic cathedral, and its remote archetype, the Greek column.

The changes which the handwriting of the Western world underwent from the commencement of the Middle Ages to the revival of the simple Roman character in the first printed texts have been most clearly traced out, century by century, by means of the vast series of dated specimens of medieval writing still extant.

When we turn from the Palæography of the Western to that of the Eastern world, we find the evidence of the subject in a far less accessible state.

In tracing back the history of Oriental systems of writing, as in investigating the sources of Oriental civilisation, we cannot, as in the West, recognise in many varieties the same original classical type; there is no one paramount influence, no one continuous stream of tradition, no one alphabet the parent of all the rest; the chronological basis of the Palæography rests on much less certain grounds.

When this branch of the history of writing has been more studied, we shall be able to say more positively whether the Assyrian Cuneiform is a modification of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, whether the Phœnician alphabet was derived from the same elements, whether it was the parent not only of the Greek and the Roman, but also of the Semitic alphabets generally, and we shall probably discover more than one other independent source whence some of the Oriental alphabets may have been derived.

This, then, is one point of view in which the Archaeologist may regard all written memorials.—as evidence either of the invention or of the tradition of the alphabetic system; but the history of the art cannot be fully investigated without taking into account the nature of the writing materials employed. These materials have been very different in different ages and countries. Character may be either graven on hard materials, such as stone or metal, written on pliable materials, such as bark, papyrus, parchment, linen, paper, or impressed as the potters' names are on the Samian ware, or the legends of coins on a metallic surface. The greater part of the writing of the ancient world has been preserved on the native rock, hewn stones, metallic tablets,