Fourth Paper.
You would hardly believe it possible that there are so many alphabets in the world which seem to have nothing to do with one another—neither coming one from another by borrowing, nor descending, apparently, from the same alphabet thousands of years ago. The numbers of existing nations and of men to-day are as nothing compared with those that have perished. So the number of existing alphabets and syllabaries are but as a handful compared to those that have passed away and left no trace whatever. Writings on paper and bark can remain only as long as the paper and bark hold together; even in Egypt, where, owing to the dryness of the climate, paper lasts longer than elsewhere, it can last only a few thousand years. Nations that once for long periods possessed writings are now completely unknown, and with them their alphabets also have perished, because no record of their existence was left on rock, brick, or pottery. What looks, therefore, like an abundance of material by which to read the life of alphabets is really very little compared to what we ought to have.
You remember how nations like the Phoenicians, when adopting a new series of letters, name these letters according to their own fancy, just as we sometimes teach children their alphabet by saying, "A was an Archer" (or we may prefer to have A stand for an Apple, or some other word beginning with A); and "B was a Butcher," or "a Bear," or some other word beginning with B. There is no doubt that both the Romans and the Greeks had lists of words useful to remind children of their letters. Now, our alphabet came directly to us from the Irish missionaries and professors of religion and wisdom, who taught Christianity to the heathen Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Goths, Germans, Danes, and Swedes, several centuries after the death of our Lord. They did not learn from the Phoenicians, although they have traditions that seem to point to settlers in Ireland bearing a similar name. Instead of using the Latin names for the letters taken from the Christian Romans, they gave them names of their own. Their wise and pious men had been members of, or were the pupils of, a class of learned heathens called the Druids. In ancient Ireland, a druï was prophet, priest, doctor, and magician, and the name seems to be connected with our word tree. It was against the rule of the Druids to write things down. They were in the habit of retiring to the deepest woods for meditation and study, sometimes attended by pupils. That is probably the reason why the Irish, among whom the Druids retained their power the longest,—because Ireland was the hardest to reach of all the great islands thereabouts, and the last to feel the changes taking place elsewhere in Europe,—chose this pretty system of naming the letters of the Latin alphabet when it became common. Instead of calling A, alpha, as the Latins usually did, they said A, ailm, the word which stood in their language for palm-tree and came, in sound, nearest to alpha, and began with an A. Instead of beta they said beith, the word for birch-tree, almost the same in sound as the Phoenician, but quite different in meaning. And so with the other letters: Coll, hazel; duir, oak; eadha, aspen; fearan, alder; gort, ivy; huath, whitethorn; iogha, yew; luis, mountain-ash; muin, vine; nuin, ash; oir, broom; peith, dwarf-elder; suil, willow; teine, furze; ur, heath. They called this alphabet bethluisnion, choosing out the letters B, L, and N, instead of the letters A and B, to form a name. Another term, more nearly like the word alphabet, was aibcitie, or A-B-C order, the syllable tie meaning order, or sequence. Living in wooden houses, in lands mostly covered with trees, the people of Ireland were specially fond of plants, and so named their letters from plants alone. Such a method may possibly point to an early syllabic system among these races, founded on pictures of trees and plants, on leaves, on hunting-tools, and things connected with woodcraft; but at present we can only make this guess. It is very unlikely that so early and rude a writing would be placed on stone or metal, and so come down to us. The Egyptians used trees or plants but seldom, either in their symbolic or alphabetic hieroglyphics. Our S alone, of the letters, comes from a little picture of growing plants, which is supposed to represent a garden overflowed by the Nile. Egypt was peculiarly wanting in forests. Population was dense and animals abounded. On the other hand, a partiality for trees is found in all the Celtic tribes. The intense love of nature shown in the modern literature of Germany, France, and Italy, of Great Britain and the United States, may be traced to the Highland Scotch, and from this may be derived the still more modern passion for pictures of landscape.
OLD IRISH ALPHABET.
The clans of Scotland, blood relations and descendants of the Irish, chose for emblems, or "badges," either a plant or its flower. Thus, the MacKays chose the bulrush. The general badge for Irishmen, as you know, is a little plant like the sorrel, called the shamrock; while that for Scotland is, appropriately enough, the hardy, prickly, but not unbeautiful thistle. The English, too, show traces of the same idea; their race-badge is the rose, a foreign plant, perhaps because they were more thoroughly subjugated by the Normans than were the Scotch and Irish; perhaps because their land is like a rose-garden for cultivation. Now, some Irishmen have claimed that the Phoenicians made settlements in Ireland many centuries before Christ. If they ever taught their alphabet to the tribes of that island, it has been crowded out by others, or has fallen into disuse. Some kind of writing had existed before the Christians introduced the bethluisnion; there is hardly a doubt that altered Greek letters, known as Runes, were used in Ireland; but with the exception of the mysterious Oghans, which will be noticed further on, none are to be found; for, just as nations have been struggling with nations from the earliest period to which we can look back, and forms of government with other forms, and languages with languages, so systems of writing have been struggling with systems of writing. Sooner or later the best, that is to say, the most convenient, alphabet wins the day. Within a few centuries, the rounded and perfected form of the Christian alphabet has taken the place of the old Irish alphabet, which was itself an earlier form of the very same Christian letters.
You have traced your letters back through the Irish missionaries to the Christians of Rome; but how did they come to Rome? You must know that among the great and renowned cities founded by the Phoenicians in Greece was Chalkis, a town in the island of Euboea. This island is close to the mainland of Greece, and its inhabitants are called Boeotians. Now the Athenians, who considered themselves very smart people, used to make all manner of fun about the stupidity of the Boeotians. But just why the Boeotians were thought very stupid folk, unless through jealousy or rivalry, I do not see, for one of the greatest poets of the world, called Pindar, was a Boeotian, and many famous generals, artists, architects, painters, and writers came from the ranks of this so-called stupid folk. And for all the fun they liked to make of these island people, the rest of Greece, including Athens, very likely had to come to the Boeotians for the alphabet. But you are not to suppose that the Phoenicians came to Euboea in the flourishing days of Athens, when the marvelous sculptors lived. It was long before. And the Latins of Italy, in their turn, took their letters from the Greek-Phoenicians of Chalkis long, long before Rome became a famous town. And it was because of great wars and the attacks of Asiatic nations that the people who had the best alphabet came to Europe at all.
The Phoenicians were driven out of Asia Minor by the armies of other nations, which, under different names, are mentioned in the Bible, and perhaps among these were the Jews, in whose language the Bible has come down to us. It is more than probable that the ambition of great nations still farther to the eastward, drove the nearer nations of Syria upon the Phoenicians, who held the sea coast. But there was another inducement. The Phoenicians became very rich from their trading voyages; and also, I fear, from their plundering and kidnapping of slaves, for the Mediterranean was the haunt of buccaneers until the Romans frightened pirates into some kind of peaceableness. Even in this century it was necessary for the United States to send a fleet against the pirates that sailed from ports in Northern Africa. The riches of the Phoenician towns must have tempted the neighboring tribes to attack them. At any rate, having already made many settlements elsewhere, the Phoenicians began to give way more than a thousand years B. C., and to take refuge in their old or new colonies. Some old Greek traditions tell how Kadmus, a mighty leader and a very wise man in all the arts and sciences, came over from Asia and taught the Boeotians letters. In Phoenician the word Kadmus means the East-man, while the word Europe, which gradually was applied to a vast extent of land, a continent, at first belonged only to the land just across from the island of Euboea, on the other side of the narrow strait called Euripus, and means, in Phoenician, the West-land. So when you read of Kadmus coming to Europe it is the East-man coming to the Westland. Over and over again in history we find names to which all sorts of fanciful derivations have been given, and beautiful legends and myths have been attached, turning out to be the simplest kind of words. Thus, Ireland also means the Westland, and it comes from the Celtic word iar and our word land; iar meaning the West. Iar, before being used to denote the West, meant the back, and that fact lets us into an important secret concerning the religion of the Celts who first came over the Irish sea to the Emerald Island. It tells us that those early men named the points of the compass according to the other directions when the observer faced toward the East. So the East was named from front, or forward, the West from back or behind, the North from left hand, and the South from right hand. That means that the early Celts worshiped the Dawn and the Sunrise. And so faithfully have the old traditions remained in men's minds in that big western island of the British Empire that, to this day, the emblem on the coat of arms of Ireland is a sunburst, or rising sun.
Another curious thing is that it is more than probable that the Irish preference of the color green, for their flag and their sashes, arose from a mistake among those who had lost a thorough knowledge of the old Irish language. The sun, in Irish, is called by a word pronounced like our word "green"; and it is likely that the Irish fondness for that color arose from the word's exact likeness in sound to their word for the sun. In the same way, when we talk about greenhouses, we think they are called so because the plants are kept green in them during winter. Yet it is far more probable that "green," here, is the Irish word meaning, not the color, but the sun; because greenhouses are built so as to catch the sun's rays and store them up while it is hidden by clouds, as happens more than half the time in showery Ireland.
But to return to Kadmus, the man, or the representation of the men, who to the ancient Greeks seemed to come out of the East. There was in Greece an ancient people whom men called the Pelasgi, or sea-people, because they seemed to live on the sea, so easy and so much at home were they on board their long black ships. Moreover, "sea-people" was a ready enough name for those who dwelt so much on islands. This Pelasgian folk at one time conquered the half of Egypt with their fleets, and with the aid of other nations. Now, when in the course of centuries, the Greeks had learned a great many things besides masonry and seacraft from the Pelasgians, and letters and seamanship from the Phoenicians,—they too, like the Syrian nations, began to push the people who had been their teachers out of their islands and towns. Doubtless the Phoenicians were very arrogant and imperious people, who fancied that their riches made them the superiors of all poorer folk, and that justice only existed for the rich. By that time they had made many flourishing settlements in Italy, Spain, and Northern Africa, and they became famous for the last time in their towns of Northern Africa, where they left numerous different alphabets. Finally the Romans, jealous of their commerce and wealth, managed to ruin their navies, defeat their armies, and sack and destroy their cities, among which the greatest was Carthage, meaning, in Phoenician, New Town. Some day, if you have not yet studied it, you can learn in Roman history all about the Roman destruction of Carthage and the time of the Punic wars. When those wars occurred, the Carthaginians were making a last effort to remain masters of the western parts of what are now called Europe and Africa, then the most western portion of the civilized world.