Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/86

72 The occurrence of alphabetic letters in Ancient Egypt, as owner's marks on pottery of the Pre-dynastic and Early-Dynastic periods, is now explained by the newly elicited facts that Menes, or Menes Aha, "the Warrior," the first of the Pharaohs, in whose reign hieroglyphs are first used for continuous writing, was identical with Manis-tusu or "Manis-the-Warrior," the famous son of Sargon-the-Great of Mesopotamia, who himself was one of the "pre-dynastic" kings of Egypt; that the other signs supposed to be "aphonic" which are used as owner's marks on the Early Egyptian pottery are mostly Sumerian syllabic word-signs; and that the Egyptian Hieroglyphs with their word-sounds and meanings are radically derived from the Sumerian or Early Aryan picture-writing, as shown in these pages and in my Sumer-Aryan Dictionary.

The extraordinary current dogma that "there are no vowels in Egyptian" and that the hieroglyph signs for a, ā, i, ī, and u are consonants can no longer be maintained. The reason also for the frequent non-expression of the short vowel in the pseudo-consonantal style of Egyptian spelling is disclosed to be due to the short vowel a being inherent in each consonant for sounding it, as in the parent Sumerian letter-sign, just as in the Aryan Sanskrit and Pali writing in which also the inherent vowel following the consonant is not expressed. Nor can Egypt any longer be regarded as the seat of the oldest and self-originated civilization of the world, or of having contributed any letter to the alphabet.

The derivation of the Old Persian cuneiform alphabet from the Sumerian and its relation to the Indian Pali and Sanskrit script is indicated for the first time.

The Brito-Phœnician writing of King Partolan of about 400 B.C., with my decipherment and reading of his inscription, in both its Phœnician and bilingual Ogam version, is now fully established.