1. The Origin of Letters.—2. The Phoenician Alphabet and Inscriptions.— 3, The Greek Alphabet. Its Three Epochs.—4. The Medieval Scripts. The Irish. The Anglo-Saxon. The Roman. The Gothic. The Runic.
1. THE ORIGIN OF LETTERS.—Alphabetic writing is an art easy to acquire, but its invention has tasked the genius of the three most gifted nations of the ancient world. All primitive people have begun to record events and transmit messages by means of rude pictures of objects, intended to represent things or thoughts, which afterwards became the symbols of sounds. For instance, the letter M is traced down from the conventionalized picture of an owl in the ancient language of Egypt, Mulak. This was used first to denote the bird itself; then it stood for the name of the bird; then gradually became a syllabic sign to express the sound "mu," the first syllable of the name, and ultimately to denote "M," the initial sound of that syllable.
In like manner A can be shown to be originally the picture of an eagle, D of a hand, F of the horned asp, R, of the mouth, and so on.
Five systems of picture writing have been independently invented,—the Egyptian, the Cuneiform, the Chinese, the Mexican, and the Hittite. The tradition of the ancient world, which assigned to the Phoenicians the glory of the invention of letters, declared that it was from Egypt that they originally derived the art of writing, which they afterwards carried into Greece, and the latest investigations have confirmed this tradition.
2. THE PHOENICIAN ALPHABET.—Of the Phoenician alphabet the Samaritan is the only living representative, the Sacred Script of the few families who still worship on Mount Gerizim. With this exception, it is only known to us by inscriptions, of which several hundred have been discovered. They form two well-marked varieties, the Moabite and the Sidonian. The most important monument of the first is the celebrated Moabite stone, discovered in 1868 on the site of the ancient capital of the land of Moab, portions of which are preserved in the Louvre. It gives an account of the revolt of the King of Moab against Jehoram, King of Israel, 890 B.C. The most important inscription of the Sidonian type is that on the magnificent sarcophagus of a king of Sidon, now one of the glories of the Louvre.
A monument of the early Hebrew alphabet, another offshoot of the Phoenician, was discovered in 1880 in an inscription in the ancient tunnel which conveys water to the pool of Siloam.
3. THE GREEK ALPHABET.—The names, number, order, and forms of the primitive Greek alphabet attest its Semitic origin. Of the many inscriptions which remain, the earliest has been discovered, not in Greece, but upon the colossal portrait statues carved by Rameses the Great, in front of the stupendous cave temple at Abou-Simbel, at the time when the Hebrews were still in Egyptian bondage. In the seventh century B. C., certain Greek mercenaries in the service of an Egyptian king inscribed a record of their visit in five precious lines of writing, which the dry Nubian atmosphere has preserved almost in their pristine sharpness.
The legend, according to which Cadmus the Tyrian sailed for Greece in search of Europa, the damsel who personified the West, designates the island of Thera as the earliest site of Phoenician colonization in the Aegean, and from inscriptions found there this may be regarded as the first spot of European soil on which words were written, and they exhibit better than any others the progressive form of the Cadmean alphabet. The oldest inscriptions found on Hellenic soil bearing a definite date are those cut on the pedestals of the statues which lined the sacred way leading to the temple of Apollo, near Miletus. Several of those, now in the British Museum, range in date over the sixth century B.C. They belong, not to the primitive alphabet, but to the Ionian, one of the local varieties which mark the second stage, which may be called the epoch of transition, which began in the seventh and lasted to the close of the fifth century B.C. It is not till the middle of the fifth century that we have any dated monuments belonging to the Western types. Among these are the names of the allied states of Hellas, inscribed on the coils of the three-headed bronze serpent which supported the gold tripod dedicated to the Delphian Apollo, 476 B.C. This famous monument was transported to Byzantium by Constantine the Great, and still stands in the Hippodrome at Constantinople. Of equal interest is the bronze Etruscan helmet in the British Museum, dedicated to the Olympian Zeus, in commemoration of the great victory off Cumae, which destroyed the naval supremacy of the Etruscans, 474 B.C., and is celebrated in an ode by Pindar.
The third epoch witnessed the emergence of the classical alphabets of
European culture, the Ionian and the Italic.
The Ionian has been the source of the Eastern scripts, Romaic, Coptic, Slavic, and others. The Italic became the parent of the modern alphabets of Western Europe.