Arabia.—Arabian writing before the time of Mohammad is only known to us under the name of Haurani and Nabathæan in the North, of Himyaritic in the South. None of these scripts resembles the Islamic characters called distinctively Arabic. The Gospel-script (Estrangelo) of the Syrians is the nearest of all the Aramaic hands to that used by the earliest Mohammadans, which (from its special cultivation in the town of Cufa) is called Cufic. But even here, the resemblance is not so close as to make it improbable that there was a link between them in some lost script of pre-Christian days. The Cufic writing which prevailed for three centuries as the mode of writing the Koran cannot strictly be shown to be the mother of the Naskhi which replaced it and has flourished for a thousand years. It is clearly older than the Naskhi in its forms, but the Naskhi has been proved to have existed contemporaneously with the Cufic almost from the beginning of Mohammadanism. After the third century of the Hijra, the Cufic was only retained for ornamentation and head-lines. By that time the Arab conquests had created a vast Mohammadan empire; the Syrians, the Persians, and the Egyptians were obliged to give up their old scripts, and to accept that of their conquerors. Arabic writing occupied not only all the seats in which Phœnician letters had been used fifteen centuries before, but even a far larger area. The writing and the language were used and known from Seville to the frontiers of India. Soon after, India likewise fell a prey; and Arabic letters have been used there ever since by the Mohammadan population. The elegant script called Talik, which was peculiar to the Persians (but has been borrowed in India), was developed in the fourteenth century. It differs little, except in gracefulness, from the typical Naskhi.
India and the further East.—The characters in which the Pracrit inscriptions of Northern India were engraved on stone, in the third century B.C., descended, with considerable modifications of form, to the various tribes of Hindus who developed the modern languages of India, now called Hindi, Gujarati, Mahratti, Panjabi, Bengali. All these languages are akin, their differences being produced by segregation and by local contact with aboriginal or foreign populations. Their character two thousand years ago (before local diversities were perpetuated in names) is described by the term Prakrit (=Natural) as distinguished from the title given to another form of the language, namely Sanskrit (=Artificial) which is believed to represent a far more ancient stage of Indian speech. In this artificial language the earliest traditions and literature of the Hindo-Aryan race are preserved, but it is supposed to have died out of speech (if ever it was spoken) several centuries before the Christian era. However that may be, we have no monument or record to show that it was written till the tenth century after Christ, and the Sanscrit alphabet is undeniably not more than eight or nine centuries old, having been artificially elaborated from the much simpler script of Asoka's time.
The graphic systems of Southern India, Ceylon, Thibet, Burma, and Siam were all derived from the script of Aryan India after Budhism had begun to spread.
In North-Eastern Asia, the Mongolian script (and out of it, the Manchurian) were formed from the writing of the Nestorian Christians who carried their Syriac books to the frontiers of China.
Spain and Gaul under the Romans
It has been already said that Punic settlements were made in Spain probably as far back as the seventh century B.C. To the Phœnicians or Carthaginians we may ascribe the introduction of letters and their application to coins and inscriptions, not only in the Punic language of the men who held Cadiz, Carthagena, and Barcelona, but also in the Iberian and Celtiberian language of native princes. Strabo says that the Turdetani (of the present Andalusia) boasted the possession of historical and poetical books of immense age in their own language; but when he was writing, about the time of the birth of Christ, they were all Romanised and unable to speak any other tongue than Latin. There exists, however, a great quantity of coins struck in Spain between 400 B.C. and the time of Augustus. There are three varieties (omitting those of Greek colonies in Aragon), namely, those in Punic language and Punic letters, those with Iberian names in Punic letters, and those with Celtiberian names in modified Punic letters. The later Iberian and Celtiberian have sometimes Latin inscriptions added to the native ones. In the first century after Christ, the whole of Spain was virtually Romanised. The Transalpine Gauls retained their own speech longer than the Spaniards did theirs, because the conquest was later; but the people of Cisalpine Gaul were Romanised even earlier than the Spaniards. The independence of Marseilles as a Greek republic came to an end in the first century of the Roman empire, and the Greek language probably died out in a few generations. Then, no doubt, Roman letters took the place of the Greek, which, as Cæsar said, were used by the Gauls in his time. Henceforward, till the fifth century, Spain and Gaul were simply outlying provinces of the empire, without anything in literature or calligraphy to distinguish their people from the Romanised Italians. It was not till the sixth century, when the Gothic kingdom had become a stable institution, that anything like a local fashion of calligraphy began to develop itself in Spain. Gaul was similarly affected by the influx first of the Visigoths, then of the Franks.
Influence of the Bible upon writing
The events which led to the compilation of the Gospels were of the greatest moment in the history of writing. The educational influence of the Bible—apart entirely from its claims to supernatural importance—in spreading the use of letters and creating schools for the study of reading and writing, has been incalculable. The historical and religious traditions of the Jews would probably have had but little effect upon the world, if the result of the various wars by which Syria was so often desolated had not been to expatriate the chosen people of the Lord. A large Jewish population occupied Northern Egypt at the time when Alexander's conquests revolutionised the old world. The establishment of Greek dynasties in that country and in Syria speedily Hellenised the upper classes and the citizens in both; and the linguistic subjugation of the Jews in Egypt was even more complete than that of their old masters. Their peculiar condition facilitated a change; for while they possessed the sacred book of the Law of their forefathers in a language that had been dead for centuries, they had only translations in the language of the country of their former exile (Chaldæa); and though they had the commercial qualification of bilingualism, their Chaldee and their Egyptian were probably equally weak. Two generations were enough to Hellenise them, and seventy years after Alexander's death, the Bible was introduced to the knowledge of the Greek world in an edition destined to render the old Hebrew scripture intelligible to Egyptian and Syrian Jews. This fortunate circumstance drew a number of people into the Elohistic fold who would never otherwise have been found there; and had no small influence in bringing about the social and moral revolution which signalised the beginning of our era.
The Septuagint must remain the true Bible of Christendom until the Hebrew text of the præ-Christian ages is discovered. Next to it in importance is the Syriac Bible, and next to that, the Latin Vulgate. All three indicate the prior existence of a Hebrew original; but to obtain a critically exact knowledge of what that original was at the time of Alexander the Great, one must resort to the Septuagint; at the time of Christ, to the Syriac; and at the time of the Emperor Julian, to the Vulgate. The Hebrew text, as we now have it, underwent so many changes and corruptions during the first few centuries of the growth of Christianity as a younger rival to Judaism, that even the oldest Hebrew MSS. are precluded by their comparative modernity from claiming equal importance with the three versions referred to. The multiplication of copies of the Syriac Scriptures, between the first century after Christ and the seventh, must have been very great; that of the Greek Bible and Testament, from the first to the fourteenth century, still greater; and that of the Latin Vulgate, from the fifth to the fifteenth, enormous. The early missionaries of the Christian Church were Hellenised Syrians or Egyptians, and they stamped the art of their native countries upon the new Biblical literature in every country except Italy. Italy was the exception, simply because it was the centre of political power and of Græco-Roman culture, and thus too learned and too fastidious to accept a new popular religion or an inferior type of ornamental art. But all the external provinces of the Empire underwent the influence of the enthusiastic proselytizers, and even Byzantium succumbed to it after the Empire of the West had been extinguished. The types of ornament created for the embellishment of Bibles were Egyptian in design and colouring; and this is the reason why the pictures in all the early examples of book-illustration in the West are supposed to have a Byzantine aspect; the fact being that while classical art faded away almost with paganism in Italy and Hellas, the Oriental substitute, which reigned from Asia Minor to Ireland, was preserved in Byzantium till the downfall of the Greek empire. A few belated specimens of degenerate classical ornament are found to represent the ages between Constantine and Charles the Great; but in general terms it may be said that Roman book-illustration died out in the fourth century. It came to life again, but in utter metamorphosis, in the decorated Irish books of the sixth-seventh century, which were really the first examples of the mediæval art of illumination.
The Coptic alphabet and the Gothic alphabet were two late and artificial inventions, due entirely to a holy rage for producing the Bible in the language of the Egyptians and the Goths. The two Slavonic alphabets likewise were late scripts, invented for the purpose of translating the Bible into Slovene. The Armenian alphabet (and out of it the Georgian) had a similar origin, and seems to have had some relationship to the Slav Glagolitic. They are both attributed to the fifth century.