Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/11

 THE ARYAN ORIGIN OF THE ALPHABET

"Numbers, too, I taught them and [Writing—] how By marshalled signs to fix their shifting thoughts." — Prometheus Bound: Æschylus, trans. by J. S. Blackie.

"The two greatest inventions of the human mind are Writing and Money — the common language of intelligence and the common language of self- interest." — Mirabeau.

invention of the Alphabet is generally admitted to be one of the very greatest scientific human achievements. It enables civilized men by an easy system of some twenty-four or so sound-signs or letters to rapidly express and register their thoughts and speak through time and space, conduct their everyday business by registers and correspondence, and chronicle their experience for the use of future generations by permanent records. And amongst other things, in association with movable type and the telegraph, which is also based upon a conventional form of the Alphabet, it has made possible that living marvel of the modern world, the newspaper, "the beating heart of civilization," which gives the news of the world as a diary of the human race.

Hitherto, the origin of our Alphabet, the objects represented by its signs or letters and its authors have remained unknown, although the subject of many diverse conjectures. Nevertheless, its authors have been assumed to be Semites by all modern writers, the one mechanically repeating the other. This is partly because Greek tradition ascribed the