CHAPTER VIII
EGYPTIAN WRITING IN ITS RELATION TO OTHER SCRIPTS
The interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics being thus settled once and for all, the next problem to be attacked was their relation, if any, to the sound-signs whence are derived the alphabets of the civilised world. We travel backwards along clearly-marked lines from our alphabet to the Roman, and thence to the Greek, which tradition attributed to the Phœnicians. Herodotus says upon this matter: "Now these Phœnicians who came with Cadmos, of whom were the Gephyraians, brought in among the Hellenes many arts when they settled in this land of Bœotia, and especially letters, which did not exist, as it appears to me, among the Hellenes before this time; and at first they brought in those which are used by the Phœnician race generally, but afterwards, as time went on, they changed with their speech the form of the letters also. During this time the Ionians were the race of Hellenes who dwelt near them in most of the places where they were; and these, having received letters by instruction of the Phœnicians, changed their form slightly and so made use of them, and in doing so they declared them to be called 'phœnicians,' as was just, seeing that the Phœnicians had introduced them into Hellas. Also, the Ionians from ancient time call paper 'skins,' because formerly, paper being scarce, they used skins of goats and sheep; nay, even in my own time many of the Barbarians wrote on such skins" (v. 58).
Pliny, in his Natural History (v. 12, 13), gives the credit of the invention of the alphabet to the Phœnicians, and other ancient authors repeat what must have been an old tradition. The honesty of these writers is unimpeachable, however much their competency may be questioned; and no slight confirmation of their testimony appears, in the judgment of many modern scholars, to be furnished by the correspondence in number, name (the sibilants s and z excepted), and order, although not in form, between the letters of the Greek and the Semitic alphabets. "In default of further evidence, the very word Alphabet," Canon Taylor remarks, "might suffice to disclose the secret of its origin. It is obviously derived from the names of the two letters alpha and beta, which stand at the head of the Greek alphabet, and which are plainly identical with the names aleph and beth borne by the corresponding Semitic characters. These names, which are meaningless in Greek, are significant Semitic words, aleph denoting an 'ox,' and beth a 'house.'" The following table shows the names and order of the Greek and Semitic letters, the Hebrew being selected as the type of a Semitic alphabet, because it is more familiar than any other (cf. Taylor's History of the Alphabet, vol. i. p.75).
| HEBREW. | GREEK. | |||||
| Name. | Meaning. | Name | ||||
| א | Aleph | ox | Α | α | Alpha | |
| ב | Beth | house | Β | β | ϐ | Beta |
| ג | Gimel | camel | Γ | γ | Gamma | |
| ד | Daleth | door | Δ | δ | Delta | |
| ה | He | window | Ε | ε | Epsilon | |
| ו | Vau | hook | (Vau | — | obsolete) | |
| ז | Zayin | weapons | Ζ | ζ | Zeta | |
| ח | Cheth | fence | Η | η | Eta | |
| ט | Teth | serpent? | Θ | ϑ | θ | Theta |
| י | Yod | hand | Ι | ι | Iota | |
| ך | Kaph | palm of hand | Κ | κ | Kappa | |
| ל | Lamed | ox-goad | Λ | λ | Lambda | |
| ם | Mem | waters | Μ | μ | Mu | |
| ן | Nun | fish | Ν | ν | Nu | |
| ס | Samekh | post | Ξ | ξ | Xi | |
| ע | 'Ayin | eye | Ο | ο | Omicron | |
| ף | Pe | mouth | Π | π | Pi | |
| ץ | Tsade | javelin? | (San | — | lost) | |
| ק | Qoph | knot? | (Koppa | — | obsolete) | |
| ר | Resh | head | Ρ | ρ | Rho | |
| ש | Shin | teeth | Σ | σ | ς | Sigma |
| ת | Tau | mark | Τ | τ | Tau | |
| Υ | υ | Upsilon * | ||||
| Φ | φ | Phi * | ||||
| Χ | χ | Chi * | ||||
| Ψ | ψ | Psi * | ||||
| Ω | ω | Omega * | ||||
* "of later origin"
Assuming the theory of the Phœnician origin of the alphabet to be established, the next question is, was that alphabet an independent invention, or was it adapted from another set of characters? As has been seen, all evidence goes to show that sound-signs have been derived from pictographs, and, if the Phœnician script be no exception to this, search must be made for its earlier forms. Tradition asserted that "the Phœnicians did not claim to be themselves the inventors of the art of writing, but admitted that it was obtained by them from Egypt." So says Eusebius, and the same tradition has currency among classic authorities from Plato to Tacitus, while the fact of the active intercourse which long prevailed between Phœnicia and Egypt goes far in its support. The Phœnicians were of Semitic race, "dwelling in ancient time, as they themselves report, upon the Erythrean Sea" (i.e. in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf), "and thence they passed over and dwelt in the country along the sea coast of Syria; and this part of Syria and all as far as Egypt is called Palestine" (Herodotus, vii. 89). But of their origin and primitive migrations, in truth, little is known. Tyre, whose king, Hiram, gave Solomon aid in the building of his famous temple, and Sidon, are familiar names in the Bible, but that of the "Phœnicians" does not once occur, reference to them being probably included in the term "Canaanite." Professor Huxley, always felicitous in his phrases as he was supreme in exposition, aptly called them the "colossal pedlars" of the ancient world. The narrow strip of Syrian seaboard which they occupied when we first meet them in history was a meeting-place between East and West, and the nursery of a maritime enterprise which looms large in history. Their ships traded westward beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and eastward to the Indian Ocean; their colonists settled on both shores of the Mediterranean, on the Euxine, and were scattered over Asia Minor. Like the Romans, the Phœnicians had little creative instinct. Designing or discovering little, but skilfully manufacturing and circulating much, they were distributors of the wares of their own and neighbouring countries, and founded emporia in many a city of the ancient world, as e.g. at Memphis, "round about whose sacred enclosure, on that side of the temple of Hephaistos which faces the north wind, dwell Phœnicians of Tyre, this whole region being called the camp of the Tyrians," or, as we should say, the Tyrian quarter (Herodotus, ii. 112).
Obviously, one of the pressing needs of a people thus brimful of commercial activity, to whom "time was money," would be some swift and concise mode of record of transactions. Hence the supersession or abbreviation of cumbrous and elaborated characters, with their apparatus of determinatives, ideograms, and the like, by a simple "shorthand" sort of script. But of what characters? Influenced partly by the traditions already referred to, partly by the fact of the intimate relations between Phœnicia and Egypt, and doubtless by that principle of development the application of which was extending in all directions, a French Egyptologist, Emanuel de Rougé, read a paper on the history of the alphabet before the Académie des Inscriptions in 1859 (the year of publication of Darwin's Origin of Species), which, in the judgment of many scholars, appeared conclusive as to the derivation of the Phœnician (and, through that, of all other alphabets now in use) from the Egyptian characters. The success which appeared to attend M. de Rougé's researches "must be attributed to his clear perception of the fact, itself antecedently probable, that the immediate prototypes of the Semitic letters must be sought, not, as had hitherto been vainly attempted, among the hieroglyphic pictures of the Egyptian monuments, but among the cursive characters which the Egyptians had developed out of their hieroglyphs, and which were employed for literary and secular purposes, the hieroglyphic writing being reserved for monumental and sacred uses" (Taylor, i. p. 90). The method which he adopted was admirable. He took the oldest known forms of the Semitic letters that he could discover, and compared these with the oldest known forms of hieratic writing, confining that comparison to the twenty-five letters of the so-called "Egyptian Alphabet." The materials at his command were of the scantiest. On the Egyptian side hieratic papyri of the new Empire (which began about 1587 b.c.) existed in plenty, but the characters in which they are written are comparatively late. Fortunately, however, among the very few examples of the oldest form of hieratic was the Papyrus Prisse (Fig. 50), and this precious relic supplied M. de Rougé with the cursive characters which made formulation of his theory possible. On the Semitic side there are the Egyptian words which are given in Semitic form in the Old Testament, and the Semitic names of Syrian towns which are found in the Egyptian annals of conquests under the new Empire, through which the sounds severally represented by the Semitic and hieratic characters are arrived at. The chief source of epigraphic evidence was an inscription (Fig. 51) on the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar, king of Sidon, dating from the fifth century b.c., or about two thousand years later than the Papyrus Prisse, and therefore representing a late form of the Phœnician alphabet.