Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/13



vast majority, if not all, of the alphabets of the world are generally regarded as descended from one, the oldest known, "The Phœnician," which, in its non-reversed form the "Cadmean Phœnician," is the immediate parent of our modern English and European alphabet. The name "Cadmeian" was applied to it by the early Greeks after its introducer, King Cadmus the Phœnician of Tyre. The number of apparently disconnected alphabets has been steadily reduced by modern discovery and research, and the further evidence elicited in this volume and in my Sumer-Aryan Dictionary, disclosing the Sumero-Phœnician origin of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and alphabet, still further reduces them.

The earliest-known instances of reversed or "Semitic" (or rather, according to the Hebrew nomenclature, Hamitic) Phœnician alphabetic writing until a year ago dated, with the exception of the reversed Cadmean in the Isle of Thera in the Ægean, no earlier than the Moabite Stone written in the Moabite "Semitic" language, and a bowl inscribed to the god Bel or Baal of Lebanon in Phœnicia, both of the ninth century B.C., and an inscribed sarcophagus of Ahiram from the old Phœnician seaport capital of Byblos or Gebal in Phœnicia, and supposed to be of the tenth century B.C. And it was universally assumed that the Phœnicians themselves dated no earlier than "about 1000 B.C." In 1925, however, writing of the same type was found on the bust