Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/27

Rh "Roman" is not given, as that alphabet is seen to have been used in Britain before the foundation of Rome. Nor are the so-called "Aramean" alphabets of Semitic scholars exemplified. These are a miscellaneous category of more or less slightly variant local forms of "Semitic" Phœnician found in Armenia, and in the highlands of Mesopotamia, in Persia, etc., as "a commercial alphabet of Asia" from about the seventh century B.C. onwards. From these were apparently derived eventually the Arabic, Syriac, Parsee, Hebrew and Mongol scripts.

In column 1 of each plate are placed the Sumerian pictogram signs, vowel and consonantal, in Mesopotamian writing from Barton's standard plates, which are the fullest and latest on the subject. More than one scribal variant of the sign is given when it illustrates variations in the form, and the references for all are duly cited from Barton. The phonetic value or sound and ideographic meaning of each sign and object represented are cited from the standard lists of Brünnow and Meissner. For fuller references to these word-signs, see my Sumer-Aryan Dictionary. Col. 2 contains the chief Akkad cuneiform shape of the respective signs, the references for which are given under Barton in col. 1.

Col. 3 contains the Egyptian equivalents of (a) the alphabetic signs in Pre-dynastic and Early-Dynastic periods from Petrie's Formation of the Alphabet (Plates II-IV), and (b) a few hieroglyphs which now appear to be correlated to these letters. But only one of the Egyptian hieroglyphs supposed by M. de Rougé to be parents of our letters now remains, namely F, and this is derived from the Sumerian.

Col. 4 contains early forms of the Phœnician letters in the Cadmean which are properly the non-reversed alphabetic writing and in the squared form, practically identical with our modern capital letters. They are from Thera Island in the Ægean, which, according to the Cadmean legend was