Palæography / Notes upon the History of Writing and the Medieval Art of Illumination

by Bernard Quaritch

). The Eta (or Heta) was made to retain its earliest function as a strong breathing (H), although the Greeks were treating it as no more than EE. The Greek confusion between the symbols for ks, ps, and ch, affected the Latins so far that one of the three letters, i.e. X, was taken to represent the only sound of the three which their language needed, namely ks; and this being an afterthought, it was put at the end of the alphabet. Thus in the second century B.C. the Romans had their alphabet completely formed in the capital shapes, and with the phonetic values, which it thenceforward retained. The letters were A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, the F being sounded probably as our V and F, the V as our U and W. It was long afterwards that the F was restricted to the sound of English F, and V as a consonant took the sound of English V (instead of W.) The Q was a more guttural letter than the C originally, but afterwards lost its distinctiveness of utterance. When it became fashionable to learn and quote Greek, in the time of Cicero and after, the letters Κ, Υ, and Ζ were reinserted in the Latin alphabet for form's sake, as K, Y, Z. It was not till the sixteenth century that, in the northern countries of Europe, the letter J was evolved from the black letter form of I (

) and the letter V split into U and V. As for the W, it was needed only by Germanic people, and was consequently a late intruder into the modern Roman alphabet.

Indian Writing about 300 B.C.

To return to the East, the first examples of native Indian writing appeared in the rock-inscribed decrees of Asoka, found in various places over the north of India, from the Indus to the Ganges, and even in the Dekkan; which can be dated between 250 and 230 B.C. The language is Prakrit or Pali, the characters (although at first sight they seem an independent script) were derived like so many others from the Semitic system, and the nearest of the parallel types is the alphabet of the Himyarite inscriptions. The Sabæan monarchy which ruled over Southern Arabia a thousand years B.C. had had large commercial relations with India, and it was probably from that source that the people of Bombay and the North-West acquired the art of writing, how long before Asoka it would be difficult to learn. Out of the simple forms of Asoka's alphabet all the modern scripts of Indian native writing descended, including the artificial and elaborate Nagari alphabet which is one of the latest of them.

Writing in Central Asia from 300 B.C.

In the kingdom of Bactria, the coins of the kings who from about 150 B.C. followed the older Greek princes, bear inscriptions in Indian Prakrit, but not written in the same character as was used by Asoka. The two scripts differ so much in appearance not only from all others, but also between themselves, that one does not easily recognise the fact that they both must have been of Himyaritic origin. They are very different from the Pehlvi which was used by Parthian sovereigns in the second century after Christ, and by the Sassanide kings in the fourth. The Pehlvi had been evolved from the later Aramean, and must have been in use in Persia before the time of Alexander; but the existing specimens are all subsequent to the beginning of the Christian era. And as for the script which is called Zend, and which is used for writing the Zoroastrian books of the most ancient Persian language, there is nothing to prove that it is not of much later invention than the Pehlvi.

Oriental Letters after the beginning of the Christian Era

Samaria.—The writing of Palestine was probably identical originally with that of the Phœnicians, and the Samaritan script, which is still in use for biblical purposes, has retained to the present day a considerable resemblance with that of Tyre and Sidon. The expatriation and partial repatriation of the Jews and Israelites during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., had the effect of leaving only a small remnant in the north of the land who preserved their ancient writing. From that time to this some of the descendants of the Samarians have continued to write their Pentateuch (which for them is the whole of the Bible) in the ancient characters of the Hebrew language (a specimen is found on [plate 4]). All the rest of the Jews, in whatever part of the world they may have been, have retained the square character (with its various Rabbinical modifications) which they learned in Chaldæa in the seventh century B.C. But the Hebrew language never returned to the Holy Land. Hebrew, as spoken among the Samaritans, underwent the same Aramaisation as the language of the Judæans, and from three or four centuries B.C. down to the eighth century of our era, the language of all Syria was Syriac with local dialects, and Greek in the great cities. The usual character in which Syriac was written has already been mentioned, but the Samaritans wrote even their semi-Syriac speech in the old characters of their Bible; and there is a really Samaritan Pentateuch—different from the Hebrew Pentateuch in Samaritan letters—which corresponds in Samaritan literature to the Chaldee Targums of the Jews. None of the Hebraeo-Aramaic dialects long survived in Syria the conquest of the Arabs. Syriac still lived on in Western Persia and in Mongolia, and in India for a time, but only survived as a dead liturgical language. Chaldæo-Hebraic made its way westwards to Morocco, Italy, Spain and Gaul. The faithful in Samaria, now nearly extinct, clung to their Pentateuch and their religion through all vicissitudes, and have never ceased to write the Bible in the Hebrew script of ancient Palestine.