Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/243

Rh Maya sign the cross is united at the bottom, like a figure 8. Here again we turn to the valley of the Nile, and we find that the Egyptian hieroglyph for t is and ; and in the Syriac t it is. We even find the curved lines of the Maya t, which give it something of the appearance of the numeral 8, repeated accurately in the Mediterranean alphabets; thus the Punic t repeats the Maya form almost exactly as and. Now suppose a busy people compelled to make this mark every day for a thousand years, and generally in a hurry, and the cross would soon be made without curving the lines; it would become. But before it reached even that simplified form it had crossed the Atlantic, and appeared in the archaic Ethiopian sign for tsa, thus,. In the archaic Phœnician the sign for t is and ; the oldest Greek form is, or , and the later Greeks gave it to the Romans , and modified this into ; the old Hebrew gave it as  and ; the Moab stone as ; this became in time  and.

Take the letter a. In the Maya there are three forms given for this letter. The first is ; the third is. The first looks very much like the foot of a lion or tiger; the third is plainly a foot or boot. If one were required to give hurriedly a rude outline of either of these, would he not represent it thus, ; and can we not conceive that this could have been in time modified into the Phœnician a, which was ? The hieratic Egyptian a was, the ancient Hebrew, which was , or ; the ancient Greek was the foot reversed, ; the later Greek became our A.

Turn next to the Maya sign for q (ku) : it is. Now what is the peculiarity of this hieroglyph? The circle below is not significant, for there are many circular figures in the Maya alphabet. Clearly, if one was called upon to simplify this, he would retain the two small circles joined side by side at the top, and would indicate the lower circle with a line or dash. And when we turn to the Egyptian q we find it in this shape, 10*