Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/645

Rh ALPHABET 607 seem to them to be too wonderful a tiling for the result of human ingenuity. Thus in one of the Assyrian lists of the different values of syllables, published, as has been already mentioned, by royal authority, Sardanapalus V. states that the god Nebo has revealed to the kings, his ancestors, the cuneiform writing, which he thus endeavours to simplify for the better understanding of his people (Oppert, ii. 53). The Sanskrit character, which is now known to be due to a Phoenician source, was called Devanagan, &quot; belonging to the city of the gods,&quot; unless, as Prof. M. Miiller suggests (Sanskrit Grammar, p. 1), we are to understand by the gods here only the Brahmans ; but whatever the name may mean, their belief in its divine origin is certain enough. And M. Lenormant points out (i. 80) that the native Egyptian term for writing meant &quot;writing heavenly words.&quot; Now it is clear that no nation among which this belief lingered in any degree would be likely to alter fundament ally the spirit of their system of writing. Lastly, it is possible, though, as we have suggested above, not very probable, that the obscurities of the existing system may have recommended it to the priests. These reasons may suffice to show that it was not in Egypt that we -should expect to find the development of a purely phonetic system. But just as the Japanese took the Chinese characters, and gave them a development which they have never had in the land of their creation just as the people of Susiana took the cuneiform writing and made it purely phonetic, without any remnant of ideography, so the work of ex tracting order out of the chaos of Egyptian writing was reserved for the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were peculiarly fitted to perform this inestimable part in the history of human development. An active and enterprising nation, they were early brought into commercial relations with Egypt, and must of neces sity have learnt something of their system of writing; they could see its advantages and its perfectly remediable faults ; the advantage of one definite symbol for one sound, and the disadvantage of a dozen ; the desirability that this symbol should signify that sound only, and the undesir- ability of its denoting a horse or a man as well. And the religious scruples which may have affected the Egyptians need have no weight for strangers. If the characters were divine for the priests of Isis, they were a convenient instru ment to supply every-day wants for the sailors of Tyre. 1 These considerations do not, of course, amount to a proof that the Phoenician alphabet was derived from Egypt. It is of course possible that it disengaged itself by degrees out of an earlier hieroglyphic system at home. But of such a system no vestiges remain ; and the correspondence between the Phoenician characters and those of the earlier Egyptian hieratic is sufficiently striking to warrant us in regarding it as at least provisionally true that what was natural and perfectly possible did actually take place. 2 The general testimony of the early Greek and Roman writers, that the alphabet was invented in Phoenicia, must then be limited to the sense in which Tacitus says that the Phoeni cians had this credit tanquam repererint, quce acceperant. It cannot be known with certainty whether the Phoeni cians took, together with the Egyptian symbols, the phonetic values which they had in Egypt, or whether they totally disregarded those values, and simply assigned to the symbols the value of their own sounds at will The first view, however, seems clearly the more probable. The Phoenicians could only become acquainted with the Egyptian 1 M. Lenormant (p. 83) will have it that the Phoenicians must have teen &quot; tres peu religieux, et au fond presque athee.&quot; They may have been so, but surely not merely in order to borrow an alphabet from Egypt. It is enough that that alphabet could have Lad no sanctity for them. 3 For evidence of this, see plate, p. 600. symbol and sound together; the one would naturally sug gest the other ; and we should expect that they would first take the symbols belonging to those sounds which exactly corresponded in Egyptian and Phoenician, then the symbols of other Egyptian sounds which did not exactly correspond to their own, but which seemed in each case the most analogous to them ; but that there would never be any violent rupture between the symbo^ and its old sound. Yet it seems quite certain that there is no connection between the names which the letters bore in Phoenicia and the original object of which the Egyptian character is the debased representation. Thus the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet (corresponding to the Hebrew aleph)- was named from its fancied resemblance to an ox s head, the second (Hebrew beth) to a house, and so on. But the symbol which strangely seemed to the Phoenicians like an ox is only the form, rapidly drawn, of an eagle ; beth, in like manner, is the quickly-drawn figure of a crane. It would seem, then, that the Phoenicians borrowed sound and symbol, but no name. They cared nothing for the history of the symbols; and when they found it convenient to have a name for each symbol they chose some object whose name began with the letter in question;- and we should have said that it was totally impossible that .any similarity in form between the letter and the object whose name it borrowed could have helped to give currency to the nomen clature, did we not see evidence of similar and apparently equally impossible fancies in the names of the constella tions, let the origin of those names be what it may. Such, very briefly traced, seems to have been the origin of the Phoenician alphabet, the parent of almost every alphabet, properly so called, existing on the earth. For the main ramifications of this alphabet in subsequent times we cannot do better than translate the summary of an author already often referred to, M. Francois Lenormant. He distinguishes (p. 110) five main stems. These are 1. The Semitic stem, wherein the values of the letters have re mained exactly the same as those of the Phoenicians, except in a few derived alphabets framed in Persia and the countries imme diately adjacent, which being employed to write Indo-European languages, turn the soft breathings of the Phoenician into genuine vowels. This stem subdivides itself into two main branches the HebriEO-Samaritan and the Aramaic. 2. The Central stem, whose province includes Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy. The transformation of the symbols of the smooth, and even of the rough, breathings into symbols of vowels is here the- invariable rule. This stem contains first the different varieties of the Hellenic alphabet, then the alphabets derived from the Greek, including three families the Albanian, Asiatic (taking Asia in the same sense as the old Greeks did), and the Italian. In the Asiatic family we distinguish two groups one for the Phrygian alphabet only, which is made up of elements whose origin is exclu sively Greek, the other containing the Lycian and Carian, where these elements are mixed up with Cypriote* characters. The Italian family must also be subdivided into an Etruscan group and a Latin group, between which stands the Faliscan alphabet, of a mixed character. 3. The JVcstcrn stem, containing the systems of writing which resulted from the spread of the alphabet by the colonists of Tyre among the indigenous inhabitants of ancient Spain. This stem reckons but one single family. It has, as that which precedes it, for its fundamental character the change of the value of the Phoeni cian breathings. But the direction in which the forms of the letters vary is signally different. . . . 4. The Northern stem, containing only one branch, the runes of the Teutonic and Scandinavian peoples, who were settled at a particular epoch in the north of Europe, but had arrived from Asia, where they still lived duriug a part of historic time, and where they must have had imparted to them the alphabet produced by the Phoenicians. Some elements in the runic writing seem to point to a direct reception of the writing from the seamen of Canaan ; others, on the contrary, bear a certain stamp of Greek influence. . . . 3 The only two alphabets, in the strict sense of the term, which M. Lenormant cannot classify as of Phoenician origin are the Cypriote and the Persian cuneiform the former still imperfectly deciphered, but seemingly to some extent syllabic ; the latter perhaps not pure alphabetic, but retaining certain ideograms.