Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/82

68 from shipwreck in the Ægean within a few years after the Fall of Troy.

The date of the Trojan War and Fall of Troy is generally regarded as being "about 1200 B.C." And as its immortal poet lived within about 400 years of that event, his circumstantial traditions and genealogies of the leading human heroes are presumably based to a considerable extent on genuine historical facts, and thus acceptable as fairly trustworthy. We thus obtain the date of "about 1200 B.C." for Cadmus.

Now, the earliest-known alphabetic writing, both in the Cadmean and in the reversed "Semitic" Phœnician script, dates, as we have seen, to about the end of the twelfth century B.C. or the beginning of the eleventh century B.C., which is in keeping with the probability that the author of the alphabetic script was Cadmus. And Thera Island, where the earliest hitherto known inscriptions in Cadmean writing in Europe are found, was, with its strongly defensive land-locked harbour, traditionally colonized, as we have seen, by Cadmus and his Phœnicians and successors in a long line of many centuries.

Here it should perhaps be mentioned that whilst the ancient Greeks ascribed the introduction of the alphabet and its writing to King Cadmus the Phœnician several later Greek and Latin writers, the agnostic Plato, Diodorus the Silician, Plutarch and Tacitus refer to a belief, perhaps a mere hypothesis, that the Phœnicians brought their alphabet from Egypt. This has been supposed to be supported by a reference in the fragmentary fabulous legend of a mythical Tyrian priest Sanchuniathon stating the inventor of letters was the Egyptian god Taaut or Thot surnamed "Thoor," and identified by the Greeks with