Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/108

 88 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. are a hundred or so in the cuneiform syllabary. But it is a different matter if each separate character stands for nothing beyond one of the elementary articulations of the human voice. In no existing alphabet are there more than about twenty letters corresponding to sounds between which the ear will make a real distinction. Among the phonetic elements of Egyptian writing there were signs of this kind, real letters. The thing to be done was to separate them from the signs of syllables, of objects, and ideas, to take these letters and to leave to the scribes of Memphis those other modes of notation which only served to complicate and encumber their graphic system. How did the necessity for such an operation suggest itself? Was it seen from the beginning that only a portion of the Egyptian signs should be borrowed ? Were there long periods of probation, or was the alphabet constituted at once, on the principle which has given it such a prodigious success, by the genius of a single man ? This question we shall never be able to answer. The date of the invention of the alphabet, if it had a date, is still more important in the history of civilization than that of the invention of printing. To resolve a word into its primitive elements certainly required a much greater effort of the brain than to invent movable letters and print with them by pressure. W T e can hardly look without emotion upon the Forty- two-line Bible, which was printed at Mayence in 1456, but how much more deeply should we be moved could we have placed before our eyes the first inscription in which a Syrian scribe made use of those twenty-two letters that, by a long series of insen- sible changes, have taken the forms they bear on this page! Gutenberg has his statues everywhere, the work of sculptors such as Thorwaldsen and David d'Angers. Those honours are well deserved, and yet the Phoenician who presented his country with this marvellous instrument deserved them better ; but his name was forgotten even by his countrymen. If we could catch a glimpse into the profound darkness of the past, and recognize the inventor of the alphabet among the innumerable ancestors of our race, should we not lead him from the crowd and place him at the head of the long procession of benefactors to humanity ? One of the chief merits of the Phoenician alphabet lies in what we may call its universal character. The elementary articulations of the human voice are much the same among all peoples. Every