Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/109

 THE PHOENICIAN WRITING. national keyboard lacks, indeed, one or two notes, but the chief difference between one language and another can hardly be ex- pressed in written characters ; it lies in the timbre, in the intona- tion, or, if we may use the term, in the colour of the sounds. Nothing is easier than to note, either by means of the Phoenician alphabet, or of others founded upon it, the various articulations that make up a local dialect or language. Any race in whom a sight of this alphabet and of what it could do aroused a desire to write on the same principle themselves could, no doubt, invent an alphabet for their own use ; but, in those long ages of gradual progress whose results are summed up for us in the word civili- zation, the human intellect worked on no such lines. Man under- stood how to utilize the discoveries of his ancestors, and to make them points of departure for new adventures ; he did not waste his time in doing over again what had been done, and well done, already ; he set himself rather to revise and perfect. To this rule the alphabet was no exception. All those peoples who were in communication with Phoenicia by sea or land bor- rowed her characters and adapted them by a few additions and retouches to the notation of their own idiom. The Phoenicians took the forms and values of their symbols from the cursive writing of Egypt. By slow stages these symbols passed to the Hebrews, to the northern Semites, or Aramaeans, to the Libyans through Southern Arabia, and even to the Hindoos ; westwards they spread among the Greeks, the Italiots, and even the distant tribes of Spain. We cannot be surprised that in travelling so far their aspect was greatly modified. To these changes many things con- tributed ; different habits of hand, different materials, and different social conditions among those who wrote. It is when we go back to the oldest forms of the Phoenician alphabet itself, and of its direct issue, that we find resemblances so strong that all doubt as to their original identity is dispelled. Compare, for example, the characters in the oldest Greek inscriptions from Thera with those on the stele of Mesa or on the bronze cup inscribed with the name of Hiram (Fig. 32). l The student of these early alphabets will soon find, too, that it was not only the shapes of the characters that changed, but also, though in comparatively few cases, their phonetic values. The Phoenician alphabet had no vowels. The reader was left 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. No. 6, and plate iv. VOL. I. N