Additional letters.
In languages where nicer distinctions of sound were called for than the original twenty Phœnician signs carried, a few fresh letters were added, but in no case has any quite new form been invented. The added letters have always been a modification of one of the older forms—either a letter cut in half, or one modified by an additional stroke or dot. In this way the Romans made G out of C, by adding a stroke to one of its horns. V and U, I and J were originally slightly different ways of writing one letter, which have been taken advantage of to express a new sound when the necessity for a greater number of sound-signs arose; W, as its very name shows, is only a doubled form of V. At first sight it seems a simple thing enough to invent a letter, but let us remember that such a thing as an arbitrarily invented letter does not exist anywhere. To create one out of nothing is a feat of which human ingenuity does not seem capable. Every single letter in use anywhere (we can hardly dwell on this thought too long) has descended in regular steps from the pictured object in whose name the sound it represents originally dwelt. Shape and sound were wedded together in early days by the first beginners of writing, and all the labour bestowed on them since has only been in the way of modification and adaptation to changed circumstances. No wonder that, when people believed a whole alphabet to have been invented straight off, they also thought that it took a god to do it. Thoth, the Great-and-great, with his emblems of justice and his recording pencil; Oannes, the Sea-monster, to whom all the wonders of the under-world lay open; Swift Hermes, with his cap of invisibility and his magic staff; One-eyed Odin, while his dearly purchased draught of wisdom-water was inspiring him still. No one indeed—as we see plainly enough now—but a hero like one of these, was equal to the task of inventing an alphabet.
Cuneiform writing.
Before we have quite done with alphabets, we ought to speak of another system of ancient writing, the cuneiform; which, though it has left no trace of itself on modern alphabets, is the vehicle which preserves some of the most interesting and ancient records in the world. The cuneiform or arrow-shaped character used by the ancient Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians, is supposed to owe its peculiar form to the material on which it was habitually graven by those who employed it. It arose in a country where the temples were built of unburned brick instead of stone, and the wedge-shaped form of the lines composing the letters is precisely what would be most easily produced on wet clay by the insertion and rapid withdrawal of a blunt-pointed stick or reed. Like all other systems, it began in rude pictures, which gradually came to have a phonetic value, in the same manner as did the Egyptian hieroglyphics. The earliest records in this character are graven on the unburned bricks of pyramidal-shaped temples, which a little before the time of Abraham began to be built by a nation composed of mixed Shemite, Cushite, and Scythian (i.e. Turanian) peoples round the shores of the Persian Gulf. The invention of the character is ascribed in the records to the Turanian race, the Accadians, who are always designated by the sign of a wedge, which was equivalent to calling them the writers, or the literary people. The Accadians discovered this writing; but it was taken up and wrought to much greater perfection by their successors, the Shemites. In their hands it became the vehicle in which the history of the two great empires of Babylon and Nineveh, and the achievements of ancient Persian kings, have come down to us. For when Nineveh fell before the Persians, they adopted the cuneiform writing of the Assyrians.
We have all seen and wondered at the minute writing on the Assyrian marbles and tablets in the British Museum, and stood in awe before the human-headed monster gods—
‘Their flanks with dark runes fretted o’er,’
whose fate, in surviving the ruin of so many empires, and being brought from so far to enlighten us on the history of past ages, can never cease to astonish us. When we look at them again, let us spare a thought to the history of the character itself. Its mysteries have cost even greater labour to unravel than hieroglyphics themselves. To the latest times of the use of cuneiform by the Achæmenidæ, pictorial, symbolic, and phonetic groups continued to be mixed together, and a system of determinative signs was employed to show the reader in what sense each word was to be taken. But this system of writing never reached the perfection attained by the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It never advanced to the use of what may be called true letters, never beyond the use of syllabic signs. So that in time it was superseded by alphabets descended from the Egyptian. The symbolism, too, of the cuneiform writing is very complex, and the difficulty of reading the signs used phonetically is greatly increased by the fact of the language from which they acquired their values (a Turanian one) being different from the Semitic tongue, in which the most important records are written.
Of other systems of writing, chiefly pictorial, known in the ancient world, such as the Hittite and the Cypriot—or, again, of the picture-writing of many other savage tribes beside the North American Indians, it is not necessary to speak. For we are not writing a history of alphabets, but of the acquisition of the art of writing by mankind.
CHAPTER XIV.
CONCLUSION.
Vortices of national life.