These carefully drawn hieroglyphic or “sacred-sculpture” pictures, used as they were for the solemn records of church and state, were kept up for sacred purposes into the time of the Greek dynasty, and even the Roman empire in Egypt. Indeed after the secret of deciphering them had been lost for many ages, the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra were among the first identified by Dr. Thomas Young. But from very ancient times the Egyptian scribes, finding the elaborate pictures too troublesome for business writing on papyrus, brought them down (much as the Chinese did theirs) to a few quick strokes. These were the “hieratic” characters, a few of which are seen in the second column of [Fig. 51] following their hieroglyphic originals. Yet even when they used these, the Egyptian scribes never freed themselves from the trammels of their early picture-writing, so as to do away with the unnecessary multitude of phonetic signs, and drop the determinative pictures as useless. This great move was made by foreigners.
Tacitus, in a passage of his Annals describing the origin of letters, says that the Egyptians first depicted thoughts of the mind by figures of animals, which oldest monuments of human memory are to be seen stamped on the rocks, so that they (the Egyptians) appear as the inventors of letters, which the Phœnician navigators brought thence to Greece, obtaining the glory as if they had discovered what they really borrowed. This account may be substantially true, but it does not give the Phœnicians credit for their practical good sense, which they were able to follow, being strangers and not bound by the sacred traditions of Egypt. No doubt the Phœnicians (or some other Semitic nation), when they learnt the Egyptian hieroglyphics, saw that the picture-signs mixed with the spelt words had become mere surplusage, and that all they really wanted was a small number of signs to write the sound of their words with. Thus was invented the earliest so-called Phœnician alphabet. Some of its letters may have been actually copied from the Egyptian characters, as is seen by [Fig. 51], which shows a selection from the compared set drawn up by De Rougé, so arranged as to pass from the original Egyptian hieroglyphic to its hieratic form in the current writing, and thence to the corresponding letter of the Phœnician alphabet, with its value in our letters and examples of similar letters in other well known forms of the alphabet.
Fig. 51.—Egyptian hieroglyphic and hieratic characters compared with letters of Phœnician and later alphabets (after De Rougé).
It seems to have been about the tenth century B.C., that the original alphabet was made, forms of which were used by the Moabites, Phœnicians, Israelites, and other nations of the Semitic family to write their languages. A curious proof that it was among these Semitic nations that the alphabet was first shaped, has come down to us in its name. To understand this, it has to be noticed that the letters were named, each by a word beginning with it. The Hebrew forms of these names are familiar to English readers from Psalm cxix., where they stand in their order aleph or “ox” for a, beth or “house” for b, gimel or “camel” for g, and so on. This is a natural way of naming letters; indeed our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had another such set of names belonging to the rune-letters they used in old times, calling their letter b, beorc or “birch,” their letter m, man, their letter th, thorn. Now what confirms the history that the Phœnicians had the alphabet first and the Greeks learnt the art of writing from them, is that the Greeks actually borrowed the Phœnician names for the letters, which were like the Hebrew ones just given, and which in Greek passed into the well-known forms alpha, beta, gamma, &c. Thence comes the word alphabet, which thus preserves the traces of the letters having been made and named by the Phœnicians, having passed from them to the Greeks and Latins, and at last came down to us. It is interesting to look through a book of alphabets, where not only may be traced the history of the Greek and Latin letters, and others plainly related to them, such as the Gothic and Slavonic, but it may even be made out that others at first sight so unlike as the Northmen’s runes and the Sanskrit characters, must all be descendants of the primitive alphabet. Thus the Brahman writes his Veda, the Moslem his Koran, the Jew his Old and the Christian his New Testament, in signs which had their origin in the pictures on temple walls in ancient Egypt.
Such changes, however, have taken place in writing, that it often requires most careful comparison to trace them. If one showed a Chinese an English note scribbled in modern handwriting, it would not be quite easy to prove to him that the characters were derived from old Phœnician ones such as those in [Fig. 51]. Our running-hand must be traced back through copybook-hand, and from small letters to Roman capitals, and so further back. Readers will find this worth doing as an exercise. They may also be recommended to look at old-fashioned English writing, such as a Parish Register of the 16th century, which will show how much more the writing of that period was like the crabbed hand in which it is still thought proper to write German. We English fortunately learnt a simpler and better style from the Italian writing-masters, who taught us the “Roman hand” which Malvolio recognizes in Twelfth Night. Alterations in letters were not only made for convenience, but also for decoration. Thus among the scribes of the middle ages there arose fanciful varieties such as what we call Old English and Black Letter, and still use for ornamental purposes. This style of manuscript being in fashion when printing was introduced in Europe, English books were at first printed in it, as many German books are still. One has only to read a page of a German book so printed to satisfy oneself how great a gain of clearness it was to discard these letters with forms broken by unmeaning lines, and return to the more distinct Latin letters we now use.
Beside these general changes of alphabet, the history of writing shows how from time to time alterations have been made as to particular letters. The original Phœnician alphabet was weak in vowels, in a way which the learner of Hebrew can understand when he tries to read it without the vowel points, which are more modern marks put on for the benefit of those who do not know the language well enough to tell how each word should be pronounced. The Phœnician alphabet did not altogether suit the writers of Greek and Latin, who altered some letters and made new ones in order to write their languages more perfectly, and thus other nations have made free in adding, dropping, and altering letters and their sounds, to get the means required for each to express its own tongue. To such causes may be traced letters not known to the primitive alphabet, such as Greek Ω and English W, which are explained by their names of Omega or “great-O,” and “double-U.” The digamma or Ϝ fell out of use in Greek, and the two valuable Anglo-Saxon th-letters, ð and Þ, are lost to modern English. The letters Η and Χ are examples of letters which in Greek served purposes other than those English uses them for. By arranging their alphabets to suit the sounds of their languages, nations contrive with more or fewer letters to spell with some accuracy, Italian managing this fairly with twenty-two letters, while Russian uses thirty-six. English has an alphabet of twenty-six letters, but works them without regular system, so that our spelling and pronunciation disagree at every turn. One cause of this state of things has been the attempt to keep up side by side two different spellings, English and French, as where g is used to spell both the English word get and the French word gentle. Another cause has been the attempt to keep up ancient sounds in writing, although they have been dropped in speaking; thus in throuGH, casTle, sCene, the now silent letters are relics of sounds which used to be really heard in Anglo-Saxon thurH, Latin casTellum, Greek sKēnē. What makes this the more perplexing is, that in many words English writing does simply try to spell what is actually spoken; English tail does not keep up the lost guttural of Anglo-Saxon tæ̂gel, nor does English palsy retain letters for the sounds that have vanished in its derivation from French paralysie. Our wrong spelling is the result not of rule but of want of rule, and among its most curious cases are those where the grammarians have managed to put both sound and etymology wrong at once, writing island, rhyme, scythe, where their forefathers rationally wrote iland, rime, sithe. It is reckoned that on an average, a year of an English child’s education is wasted in overcoming the defects of the present mode of spelling.
The invention of writing was the great movement by which mankind rose from barbarism to civilization. How vast its effect was, may be best measured by looking at the low condition of tribes still living without it, dependent on memory for their traditions and rules of life, and unable to amass knowledge as we do by keeping records of events, and storing up new observations for the use of future generations. Thus it is no doubt right to draw the line between barbarian and civilized where the art of writing comes in, for this gives permanence to history, law, and science. Such knowledge so goes with writing, that when a man is spoken of as learned, we at once take it to mean that he has read many books, which are the main source men learn from. Already in ancient times, as compositions of value came to be written, there sprang up a class of copyists or transcribers, whose business was to multiply books. In Alexandria or Rome one could go to the bibliopole or bookseller and buy a manuscript of Demosthenes or Livy, and in later ages the copying of religious books splendidly illuminated, became a common occupation, especially in monasteries. But manuscripts were costly, only the few scholars could read them, and so no doubt it would have remained had not a new art come in to multiply writing.
This was a process simple enough in itself, and indeed well known from remote ages. Every Egyptian or Babylonian who smeared some black on his signet-ring or engraved cylinder, and took off a copy, had made the first step towards printing. But easy as the further application now seems to us, no one in the Old World saw it. It appears to have been the Chinese who invented the plan of engraving a whole page of characters on a wood-block and printing off many copies. They may have begun as early as the sixth century, and at any rate in the tenth century they were busy printing books. The Chinese writing, from its enormous diversity of characters, is not well suited to printing by movable types, but there is a record that this plan was early devised among them, having been carried on with separate terra-cotta types in the eleventh century. Moslem writers early in the fourteenth century describe Chinese printing, so that it was probably through them that the art found its way to Europe, where not long afterwards the so-called “block-books,” printed from whole page wood-blocks after the Chinese manner, make their appearance, followed by books printed with movable types. Few questions have been more debated by antiquaries than the claims of Gutenberg, Faust, and the others to their share of honour as the inventors of printing. Great as was the service these worthies did to the world, it is only fair to remember that what they did was but to improve the practical application of a Chinese invention. Since their time progress has been made in cheapening types, making paper by machinery, improving the presses, and working them by steam-power, but the idea remains the same. Such is, in few words, the history of the art of printing, to which perhaps, more than to any other influence, is due the difference of our modern life from that of the middle ages.
In examining these methods of writing, we began with the rude hunter’s pictures, passing on to the Egyptian’s use of a picture to represent the sound of its name, then to the breaking down of the picture into a mere sound-sign, till in this last stage the connexion between figure and sound becomes so apparently arbitrary, that the child has to be taught, this sign stands for A, this for B. In curious contrast with this is the modern invention of the phonograph, where the actual sound spoken into the vibrating diaphragm marks indentations in the travelling strip of tinfoil, by which the diaphragm can be afterwards caused to repeat the vibrations and re-utter the sound. When one listens to the tones coming forth from the strip of foil, the South Sea Islander’s fancy of the talking chip seems hardly unreasonable.