The Story of the Alphabet

by Edward Clodd

Fig. 69.—Signs on Amphora-handle (Mycenæ)

Dealing, as the limits of the subject compel, only with the traces of inscriptions on remains from Mycenæ itself, the earliest to be noted is a stone pestle with one incised character which resembles a Cypriote sign. But one sign does not make an alphabet, and hence the satisfaction at the recent discovery of the handle of a stone vase, apparently of a local material, which has four or five signs engraved upon it, and of the handle of a clay amphora from a chambered tomb in the lower town of Mycenæ with three characters, while a tomb at Prousia, near Nauplia, yielded a genuine Mycenæan vessel with three ears, on each of which is graven a sign resembling the Greek H. These may not suffice to demonstrate the existence of a pre-Phœnician system of writing in Greece, but, taken in conjunction with the numerous discoveries of inscribed signs in Crete, they go far in support of it. What, then, are the facts as thus far, ascertained?

There have been discovered in Crete a number of objects bearing two sorts of writing, one hieroglyphic or pictographic; the other linear and approaching the alphabetic. The pictographic is the older of the two, dating from the earlier part of the third millennium before Christ. It was probably derived from a primitive picture-writing by the non-Hellenic inhabitants of the island, who were called Eteocretans, or "true Cretans," by the Dorians, whose invasion dates, according to the traditional Greek chronology, from about the middle of the twelfth century b.c. These "true Cretans" may not, however, be the aboriginal inhabitants, although as to this, and as to their language, we are in ignorance. The recent discovery of an inscription in an unknown language, written in archaic Greek characters, among the ruins of Præsos, the chief Eteocretan settlement, warrants the inference that the old script of the language had been abandoned for the Greek alphabet. That script, the use of which never passed outside the island, obviously had no influence on Mycenæan civilisation.

The linear system is syllabic; perhaps, in some degree, alphabetic. Its possible derivation from the hieroglyphic has been indicated, but although it is a conventionalised form of pictograph, Dr. Tsountas is positive in denying its connection with the Eteocretan. He suggests that its simplification took place in the East, and among a people or peoples not Greek. Thence it was carried into Greek lands, spreading more in the islands, at least in Crete, than in the Peloponnesus or other portions of the mainland, where, as shown above, the number of inscribed objects is exceedingly small. The question is far from ripe for solution, but Professor Flinders Petrie, with whom lies a large share of honour in contributing towards a settlement, courteously permits me to quote the following from a letter on the subject, dated 2nd September 1899: "A great signary (not hieroglyphic, but geometric in appearance, if not in origin) was in use all over the Mediterranean 5000 b.c. It is actually found in Egypt at that period, and was split in two, Western and Eastern, by the cross flux of hieroglyphic systems in Egypt and among the Hittites. This linear signary was developed variously, but retained much in common in different countries. It was first systematised by the numerical values assigned to it by Phœnician traders, who carried it into Greece, whereby the Greek signary was delimited into an alphabet. But the fuller form of the signary survived in Karia with thirty-six signs, and seven more in Iberia, thus giving values to forty-three. This connection of the Iberian with the Karian is striking; so is that of the Egyptian with the West rather than with the East. Signs found in Egypt have thirteen in common with the early Arabian, fifteen in common with Phœnician, and thirty-three in common with Karian and Kelt-Iberian. This stamps the Egyptian signary of the twelfth and eighteenth dynasties as closely linked with the other Mediterranean systems." In an important paper read at the meeting of the British Association, 1899, Professor Flinders Petrie remarks: "We stand therefore now in an entirely new position as to the sources of the alphabet, and we see them to be about thrice as old as had been supposed. That the signs were used for written communications of spelled-out words in the early stages, or as an alphabet, is far from probable. It was a body of signs, with more or less generally understood meanings; and the change of attributing a single letter value to each, and only using signs for sounds to be built into words, is apparently a relatively late outcome of the systematising due to Phœnician commerce." (Jo. Anthrop. Inst., Aug.-Nov., 1899, p. 205.)

Connecting the results of explorations in Asia Minor, Egypt, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Thera, Melos, and other islands of the Eastern Mediterranean with those in the Peloponnesus, the existence of a pre-Phœnician civilisation, of which Mycenæ may be conveniently regarded as the centre, appears to be demonstrated.

That civilisation, so far as its connection with the prehistoric stages of man's development goes, falls in, like aught else in this wide and ancient world, with the doctrine of continuity, but for purposes of time-reckoning dates at latest far back in the third millennium before our era. Mycenæan vases have been found in Egypt, and Egyptian scarabs in Mycenæan deposits. They prove an intimate intercourse between the two countries two thousand five hundred years before Christ. And there was intercourse farther afield. The imitations of Babylonian cylinders, the sculptured palms and lions, the figures of Astarte and her doves, show that fifteen hundred years before the date ascribed to the Homeric poems Assyria and Greece had come into contact. But the examples of Oriental art which had found their way to the soil of Argolis remained more or less exotic, the independent features of Mycenæan art being retained unaltered. Now the cumulative effect of this evidence, which is only baldly summarised here, is to shatter to pieces current theories as to the Phœnician origin of European civilisation, and, consequently, what mainly concerns us here, of the Phœnician origin of the European alphabets through the Egyptian hieratic. For that evidence shows that the Mycenæan civilisation is (1) earlier in time, and (2) indigenous in character.

(1) The evidence as to priority can be summarily stated. Civilisation in the Ægean and on the Greek mainland dates from beyond 3000, b.c., and reached its meridian between the sixteenth and the twelfth centuries of that era. Almost all that we know about the Phœnicians is at second-hand, since, if they ever had a literature or native chronicles, these have not survived. Piecing together classical tradition and references in Egyptian and Hebrew records, we gather that for some three centuries onwards from 1600 b.c. Phœnicia was a dependency of the Pharaohs. There was a Tyrian quarter at Memphis 1250 b.c. Hiram appears to have refounded Tyre 1028 b.c., from which time its commercial importance dates; while the refounding of its future great rival Carthage is assigned to the early years of the eighth century b.c. The decay of the Mycenæan civilisation, which followed as one of the many results of the Dorian invasion in the twelfth century b.c., gave the Phœnicians their chance. They overran the Ægean, and remained the dominant power in the Mediterranean until the Greeks, reviving their ancient traditions, expelled the Phœnicians from their waters, and broke their supremacy when Tyre was sacked by Alexander the Great, 332 b.c. Between their rise and fall, their commercial pre-eminence enabled them to impose upon the Greeks the alphabet which was the vehicle of preservation of the intellectual wealth of the Hellenes, and of all literature that followed theirs. What were the probable sources of that alphabet will be considered presently.

(2) After allowing full play for Asian and Egyptian influences, the fact abides that there was a well-developed native Mycenæan art. The decoration of the pottery is non-Oriental and non-Egyptian; the seaweeds and marine creatures depicted are home-products of the island world of Greece; and where sacred trees and pillars appear, we have no Semitic element, but the outcome, as Mr. Evans puts it, of a "religious stage widely represented on primitive European soil, and nowhere more persistent than in the West." But if there were stepping-stones between Argolis and Syria in the islands that lay between, there was continuous passage on the western side, making Mycenæ a link between East and West. The breaks formerly assumed between the Old and the New Stone Ages of prehistoric Europe have been filled up by the accumulation of evidence as to man's continuous tenure of that continent since his primitive ancestors crossed thither by now vanished land-routes from Northern Africa. In like manner the Mirage Orientale, as M. Salomon Reinach happily terms it, of a metal-introducing people from the East, who, in successive racial waves, swept the older settlers before them into the remotest corners of the north-west, has vanished. When once peopled, Europe, like Asia and America, ran on independent lines of development, which, however, were not isolated from connecting lines approaching from the East. The striking facts of the use of common trade-signs along both shores of the Mediterranean, and of the existence of remains of Mycenæan monuments in Sardinia, are in keeping with other facts, showing how close was the contact between one part of Europe and another centuries before the Phœnicians had left the shores of the Persian Gulf for the Syrian seaboard. They prepare us for acceptance of the new theory of "an Ægean culture rising in the midst of a vast province extending from Switzerland and Northern Italy through the Danubian basin and the Balkan peninsula, and continued through a large part of Anatolia, till it finally reaches Cyprus." (Evans, Address Brit. Assoc.; Nature, 1st Oct. 1896, p. 529.) They prepare us for the fact that in the Bronze Age, if Scandinavia and its borderlands were the source of amber, the supply of gold for Northern and Central Europe was drawn not from the Ural, but from Ireland.

The centre whence this "Ægean" culture is held to have been diffused is denoted by its name. That name, however, covers the Eastern Mediterranean region, and the question arises whether or not some precise place in that area can be indicated as the cradleland. "Hellas," says Herodotus, "was formerly called Pelasgix" (ii. 56), and this pre-Hellenic Greece was inhabited by Barbarians or Pelasgians, as they are, with equal vagueness, called. There were "Pelasgians" on the mainland and the islands; "the whole of Peloponnesus took the name of Pelasgia; the kings of Tiryns were Pelasgians, and Æschylus calls Argos a Pelasgian city; Pausanias (viii. 4, 6) says that the Arcadians spoke of Pelasgus as the first man who lived in that country, wherefore, in his reign, it was called Pelasgia; an old wall at Athens was attributed to the Pelasgians, and the people of Attica had from all time been so called. Lesbos also was called Pelasgia, and Homer knew of Pelasgians in the Troad. Their settlements are further traced to Egypt, to Rhodes, Cyprus, Epirus—where Dodona was their ancient shrine—and, lastly, to various parts of Italy." (Keane's Man Past and Present, p. 505.) Herodotus has little to say in favour of the Barbarians (which he uses as a descriptive and not a contemptuous term, the name being given by Greeks to all foreigners whose language was not Greek); he speaks of them as rude, of uncouth speech, and worshippers of repellent deities. Wachsmuth, in his Historical Antiquities of the Greeks, published over sixty years ago, says that "numerous traditionary accounts, of undoubted authenticity, describe them as a brave, moral, and honourable people, which was less a distinct stock and tribe than a race united by a resemblance in manners and the forms of life." Professor Keane fitly calls these "remarkable words," in view of the recent discoveries in prehistoric Greece, which warrant us in ascribing to the Pelasgians the development of culture in the Ægean Sea. But in what island, or on what part of the mainland? The important character of the finds at Mycenæ directs quest thither at the start. The débris of that city, and of her elder-sister city, Tiryns, have yielded varied relics of an ancient culture, from gold-masked skeletons in vaulted tombs to gorgeously decorated palaces and Cyclopean ruins of walls and fortresses. But there are traditions that these Argolic cities are of later date than Homer's "great city of Knossos" in Crete, wherein "Minos, when he was nine years old, began to rule, he who held converse with the great Zeus, and was the father of my father, even of Deucalion, high of heart," traditions pointing to the existence of an important Cretan kingdom which flourished before Agamemnon ruled in Mycenæ.