The Story of the Alphabet

by Edward Clodd

"If this writing be known (by the deceased) upon earth, and this chapter be done into writing upon (his) coffin, he shall come forth by day in all the forms of existence which he desireth, and he shall enter into (his) place, and be not rejected. Bread and ale and meat shall be given unto Osiris, the scribe Ani upon the altar of Osiris ... there shall wheat and barley be given unto him; there shall he flourish as he did upon earth, and he shall do whatsoever pleaseth him, even as do the gods who are in the underworld, for everlasting millions of ages, world without end."

Under Dr. Wallis Budge's editorship, the Ani papyrus has recently been supplemented by the issue of facsimiles and translations of papyri and other texts connected with the Book of the Dead. Among these is a Book of Breathings, written in a late hieratic, and dating from late pre-Christian times. It contains a ritual to be said by the priest for or over the dead, and teaches belief in a resurrection of the body and a state of material bliss on earth. "Thy soul shall live," and, so runs the text, "thy corruptible body shall burst into life, and thou shalt never decay." ... "Grant that his soul may go into every place wheresoever it would be, and let him live upon earth for ever and ever."

Up to a point the story of Egyptian writing illustrates the stages of development of writing generally so clearly that its recital, even at the cost of some repetition, will be helpful, and the more so as it falls into line with the story of other scripts.

"It goes without saying" that the representation of an object was a simple matter enough, the rudest draughtsmanship sufficing for a picture that should tell its own meaning at a glance. But as soon as the need arose to graphically express ideas, for example, such as vice and virtue, time and space, health and sickness, symbolism came in. To the illustrations of this supplied by the scripts already dealt with may be added a few examples from Egyptian ideography, into which, at the stage that we first meet it, the whole system of hieroglyphics may be said to have become modified. The bee was a symbol of kingship and also of industry; a roll of papyrus denoted knowledge; an ostrich feather, justice, because these feathers were supposed to be of equal length; a palm branch, one year, because that tree was popularly believed to put forth a fresh branch every new moon—although, as Mr. Gliddon suggests, a more plausible reason is in the annual cutting of the lower leaves close to the trunk. The ideograph for a priest was a jackal—not, as may be cynically hinted, because of his "devouring widows' houses," but because of his watchfulness; for a mother, a vulture, because that bird was believed to nourish its young with its own blood. Thirst was represented by a calf running towards water; power by a brandished whip; and battle by two arms, the one holding a shield and the other a javelin. Among the Dakotah Indians combat is indicated by two arms pointed at each other. The ideograph for night, a star pendant from a curve, is like the Ojibwa; while among the ancient Mexicans night was represented by a semicircle with eyes, as stars, attached to it. Signs for hunger, thirst, supplication, and so forth, among both Innuit Indian and ancient Egyptian—as indeed many other signs among peoples, both in the old world and the new, whose writing has not reached a purely phonetic stage—have that correspondence to be expected when things common to all men are graphically represented (Fig. 46). Running water, for example, remains necessarily a pictograph, but water depicted in connection with rites represents, by one symbol or another, the varying nature of the latter. Both in Egypt and Mexico it is represented flowing from a vessel, the Egyptian ideograph having a kneeling figure with arms uplifted, as if in adoration or gratitude. There appears, also, some resemblance between the symbol for negation between these two, but this has the doubt attaching to all metaphysical interpretation of signs.

Fig. 46.—Comparative Ideographs

Obviously, this presentment of ideas through graphic designs into which metaphor often bordering on enigma had to be read, implied good memories and clear grasp of association on the part of the interpreter. Any doubt or ambiguity, with resulting confusion, as to the meaning of the symbol, rendered it worse than useless. Hence the addition of "determinants," concerning which something was said when treating of the Chinese script ([see p. 85]). These are of two classes—the special and more numerous, whose use was confined to one word or idea; and the general, numbering about two hundred, which, like the Chinese "keys," refer to whole groups of words.

But ideas have to be arranged in sentences, and these are made up of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and other parts of speech for which symbolism, however ingenious, can make no provision. Moreover, while the characters are limited in their application, the ideas to be expressed graphically are ever growing, and hence, in course of time, there are not enough symbols "to go round." A way of escape opened itself, and thereby led to an invention undreamed of, when recourse was had to the use of pictures of things which were different in sense, but the names of which had the same sound; in other words, to the pictorial pun known as the rebus ([see p. 79]). As an amusing instance of the formation of a compound phonogram out of syllabic signs, Canon Taylor quotes from an inscription of Ptolemy XV. at Edfu, in which, as he says, "it seems not impossible to detect a faint flavour of ancient Egyptian humour. The name of lapis lazuli was khesteb. Now the word khesf meant 'to stop,' and the syllable teb, 'a pig.' Hence the rebus 'stop-pig' was invented to express graphically the name of lapis lazuli, which is figured by the picture of a man stopping a pig by pulling at its tail." Probably the Canon is right, but in western lands that action is often intended to make the pig move on. Another example of the rebus occurs in the name of Osiris, which in Egyptian is Hesiri (Wallis Budge gives it as Ausir). The god, on this showing, is represented, presumably, by a figure on a seat, hes, and by an eye, iri. But with the constant revision of interpretations by Egyptologists, it behoves us to quote with caution. There is a stock illustration as to the adoption of the supposed picture of a lute (used by the Egyptian scribes to denote "excellence"), as a phonogram to express the word nefer, "good." But it seems that what was thought to be a lute is the picture of a heart and windpipe!

At last, we know not when, and we cannot, speaking of Egypt alone, guess where, there dawned upon some mind the fact that all the words which men uttered are expressed by a few sounds. Hence, what better plan than to select from the big and confused mass of ideograms, phonograms, and all their kin, a certain number of signs to denote, unvaryingly, certain sounds?

That was the birth of the Alphabet, one of the greatest and most momentous triumphs of the human mind. The earliest phonograms represented syllables, not individual letters, the distinguishing signs for vowels and consonants being of yet later introduction; in fact, some alphabets, notably the Hebrew and other Semitic, have no true vowels, but only distinguishing marks, diacritical points as they are called, to denote them. To recapitulate, we have 1, picture-writing; 2, ideograms; 3, phonograms representing words; 4, phonograms representing syllables; 5, alphabetic characters. From their four hundred verbal phonograms and syllabic signs the Egyptians of a remote age—for it is literally true "that the letters of the alphabet are older than the Pyramids"—appear to have selected at the outset forty-five symbols for alphabetic use, but the rare occurrence or special use of some of these caused a further reduction to twenty-five letters. "All that remained to be done was to take one simple step—boldly to discard all the non-alphabetic elements, at once to sweep away the superfluous lumber, rejecting all the ideograms, the homophones, the polyphones, the syllables, and the symbolic signs to which the Egyptian scribes so fondly clung, and so to leave revealed in its grand simplicity the nearly perfect alphabet, of which, without knowing it, the Egyptians had been virtually in possession for almost countless ages." (Taylor, i. 68.) That step they never took, but continued the use of eye-pictures side by side with that of ear-pictures, instead of passing to the use of fixed signs for certain sounds.