Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/30

18 II at Abu Simbel, one of the "Wonders of the World" near the second cataract of the Nile, from the facsimiles by Lepsius and dated to "about 650 B.C."

Col. 9 gives the Lydian form of the Cadmean. Lydia was the old middle state of the Ægean border of Asia Minor, between the Trojan state of Mysia on the north and Caria on the south. Its chief seaport was Smyrna with its rock-cut Hittite hieroglyphs and Sumerian inscription, and the western terminus of the old Hittite "royal road" of the overland route to Babylonia. The Lydians who claimed descent from Hercules of the Phœnicians were a sea-going merchant people, the first to coin gold and silver money. And their port of Phocaea held the tin-trade traffic with Cornwall in the fifth century B.C. They kept the light Babylonian talent of weight, whilst that at Phocaea was based on the Phoenician. They are supposed to have held Troy after the Trojan War, and about that time they sent out a colony to N.W. Italy which founded there the state called Etrusca or Tyrrene, the letters of which resemble in many ways those of Lydia, but are mostly written reversed (see col. 15).

Col. 10. Old Persian or Achæmenian cuneiform alphabetic letters from the Behistun edict of Darius-the-Great, which formed the chief key to the decipherment of the Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform writing and the Sumerian. This alphabet contains besides the simple letters, now disclosed to be derived from the Sumerian simple consonantal signs with the inherent suffixed short A, also consonantal signs with suffixed i and u. Thus it has separate signs for Da, Di and Du, Ga or Gi and Gu, etc.; and it has a sign read Tr. It is, therefore, partially syllabic in the modern sense. Moreover, it is supposed to omit E, L and O. The