Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/14

4 of a statue from Byblos, which Professor Dussaud believes may be dated on palæographic grounds to "about the thirteenth century B.C." And this is supposed to confirm the "Semitic" theory of the origin of alphabetic writing. The recent discovery of a Phœniciod script on tablets, bricks, etc., unearthed at a neolithic site at Glozel, twelve miles from Vichy in the Loire Valley does not as yet help us much as the inscriptions are still unread; and while Professor Elliot Smith dates the neolithic remains there to about 2000 B.C., several savants believe the inscribed tablets are of a very much later date, and possibly Early Roman.

On the other hand, I have found on a "prehistoric" monument in Ireland inscriptions by Brito-Phœnician kings from Brutus downwards in retrograde Phœnician alphabetic writing quite as archaic as on the Byblos statue and associated with contemporary Cadmean or non-retrograde Phœnician script (see Plates, column 17), which can be positively dated to before 1075 B.C., as described in detail in my forthcoming work on "Menes, the First of the Pharaohs," which also proves conclusively that Menes was an Aryan Phœnician, and identical with Manis-tusu, Emperor of Mesopotamia, and that his father Sargon was a "Pre-dynastic" king of Egypt.