6. Jesus saith, A prophet is not received in his own country, nor doth a physician heal his neighbours.
7. Jesus saith, A city built on the summit of a lofty mountain, and firmly established, cannot fall nor be hidden.
8. Jesus saith, Thou hearest with (one ear), but the other hast thou closed.
Discoveries of this sort bring with them temptation to dwell on their significance, but that must be resisted. There is also temptation to refer to other materials bearing on the history of the Greek alphabet—notably to the inscriptions on the stupendous statue at Abu Simbel, near the second cataract of the Nile—the mere abstract of which would fill this little volume. But the excerpts—varied enough—already given will suffice to indicate what wealth of literature for our knowledge of the past these venerable relics yield, and how poor beyond redemption would the world be if shorn of those records of human thought and feeling, of those grave and gay pictures of life, so closely resembling our own, whereby, too, we learn how superficial have been the changes in human nature throughout the ages of man's tenancy of the earth.
The Diffusion of the "Phœnician" Alphabet
In the remaining pages the course of the history of the Phœnician alphabet, as we may for convenience still call it, must now be outlined, and for this purpose the following table, an abstract of that given in Canon Isaac Taylor's History of the Alphabet (i. 81), is a convenient guide.
The several alphabets, it will be seen, are grouped under three principal heads: (a) Aramean, whence most of the alphabets of Western Asia are derived; (b) Sabæan, the source of the alphabets of India; and (c) Hellenic, the source of the alphabets of Europe.
(a) Aramean, so called from "Aram," the hilly district of Mesopotamia, became, from the seventh century b.c., the commercial script of Asia, Aram lying in the line of trade between Egypt and Babylonia. Later on that script was used for official purposes at the Babylonian court, and "ultimately broke up into a number of national alphabets, for which, owing to religious causes, a separate existence became possible. The later alphabets—Parsi, Hebrew, Syriac, Mongolian, and Arabic—were at first local varieties of the Aramean. Owing to accidental circumstances they became the sacred scripts of the five great faiths of Asia—Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Northern Buddhism, and Islam. Hence the descendants of the Aramean alphabet occupy a space on the map second only to that filled by the Latin alphabet itself." (Taylor, i. 249.) They are, as indicated in the table: (1) the Hebrew, in whose modern square characters copies of the Scriptures in that language are printed, and the rolls of the Law inscribed; (2) the Syriac, once an important script of Christian literature, but now only in use among some obscure sects; (3) the Mongolian, which has a curious history, narrated at length in Canon Taylor's volumes (i. pp. 297-312). It is derived from the Syriac, which was carried by Nestorian missionaries throughout Asia. Condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431 a.d. for certain heresies concerning the dual nature of Christ, these Nestorians fled to Persia, and thence travelling eastward, preached their gospel with such success that the alphabet in which it was written became the dominant script until its supersession by Arabic on the spread of Mohammedanism. (4) The history of Arabic, which is more nearly allied to Syriac than to any other member of the Aramean group, exhibits the aggressive spirit of the Prophet, whose scriptures are transcribed in its beautiful flowing characters. It has exterminated its fellow-Semitic scripts, "expelled the Greek alphabet from Asia Minor, Thrace, Syria, and Egypt, and the Latin alphabet from Northern Africa, and is now used over regions inhabited by more than one hundred millions of the human race." The transactions of the East are recorded in the alphabet of the Koran, so that it would seem, in the world's history, that if "trade follows the flag," the alphabet follows religion.
The so-called "Arabic" numerals are probably of Indian origin, having been brought by Arab traders from the East and introduced by them into Spain in the Middle Ages, whence they spread over Europe, coming into use in England perhaps about the eleventh century. But whether India invented them, or borrowed them from Greek or other traders from the West, is unknown. Counting with the fingers, the most primitive mode of reckoning, and recording by strokes, a method still in vogue, have their limits, and hence (to say nothing of the use of pebbles and beans, and of the abacus) the invention of written signs for the higher numbers; or the adoption of the letters of the alphabet in their order as number-signs, the numerical value increasing with each successive letter; or the use of the initial letter of the word itself for the number. Examples of special symbols for tens, hundreds, and so forth are supplied by Egyptian and Assyrian records, as shown in the following figures:—