In both those cases, of which the former is but the echo, in all opinions, of the latter, our eastern extraction is only objected to, considered as Phœnician; and there, I admit that the Colonel and his pupil may get an easy triumph over their adversaries. For had the Phœnicians been the erectors of those Round Towers, what was to prevent their raising similar structures in Cornwall? where it is indisputable that they had trafficked for tin. In Spain we are certain that they had established a home; and why does this appear as free from every evidence of columnar architecture as does the former place? The same may be said of other countries whither this people resorted, Citium, Crete, Cadiz, and all the islands in the Mediterranean. In no one of them is there to be found a single edifice approaching, either in design or form, the idea of a Round Tower![464]
The Phœnicians, therefore, can have no pretensions to the honour of those memorials; nor, indeed, can their connection with Ireland be at all recognised, further than that, as having been, at one time, masters of the sea, it is merely possible that the Tuath-de-danaans may have availed themselves of their geographical information, and even consigned themselves to their pilotage for a secure retreat, aloof from the persecution of intolerance.
But as we see from the stanza quoted at [page 396], that the Tuath-de-danaans were themselves possessed of a navy; and as it is indisputable that, long before the Phœnicians, the dynasty of the Persians had swept the ocean in its widest breadth, there is no need for our giving the Phœnicians credit even for this service, which it now appears could be dispensed with.
An effort, however, has been advanced to identify their language with ours, by the analysis of the fragment of a speech which occurs in one of the plays of Plautus.[465] The idea was ingenious, but totally unfounded. Affinity, undoubtedly, there does appear,—as there does between all the ancient languages,—but nothing like identity; and the very circumstance of its having a distinct denomination assigned to it in Ireland, viz. Bearla-na-Fene, or dialect of the Phœnicians (who traded here, it is admitted), proves it to be different from our local phraseology—the Iranian Pahlavi, the polished elocution of the Tuath-de-danaans.
The Phœnicians, besides being a mercantile people, never had any monuments of literary value, whereas the Irish are known to have abounded in such from the earliest era.[466]
It is true that we have been denied the possession of alphabetic characters before the time of St. Patrick: but by whom? By Bolandus; on a false deduction from the writings of Ward, Colgan, Nennius, etc., who state that this apostle was the first who gave the “abjectoria,” or alphabet to our nation. Who says otherwise? But what alphabet was here meant? The Latin, certainly, and no other. Until then the Irish were strangers to the Roman letters;[467] but that they were not to written characters, or the cultivation of them in every variety of literature, is evident from the very fact of St. Patrick himself having committed to the flames no less than one hundred and eighty volumes of our ancient theology;[468] as well as from the recorded instance of his disciple, Benignus,—his successor also in the See of Armagh,—having, according to Ward, written a work on the virtues of the Saint, half Latin and half Irish, and which Jocelyne afterwards availed himself of, when more fully detailing his biography.
It has been the custom in all ages with those who would pass as the luminaries of their respective generations, to maintain that letters and their application were but a recent discovery! Their antiquity, however, is an historical fact, than which there can be no other better authenticated. The Bible makes frequent allusion to the cultivation of alphabetic cyphers—thus in Ex. xxiv. 4, it is said, “And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord”; and in Josh. xxiv. 26, “And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God.”
Nor is it only to the elementary part of literature, but to the very highest and noblest department of literary research that we find the ancients had arrived. In the history of Job, an acquaintance with astronomy is quite apparent. The names of Arcturus, Orion, and the Pleiades,[469] are distinctly notified in that elaborate composition.[470] Could this have been without the aid of written characters? Could the abstruse calculations involved in that pursuit be possibly carried on without an intimate knowledge of notation and of numbers? Or, if superior memory may effect it in a few cases, without such characters or legible marks, how could the results arrived at, and the steps by which they had been attained, be for any length of time preserved, and their value handed down to successive experimentalists, unless by the instrumentality of expressive signs?
We find, accordingly, in the same treatise,[471] the art of writing expressly named: Thus, “Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! that they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!” And that it was of long-continued usage is evident from a preceding chapter,[472] where it is said, “Enquire, I pray thee, of the former age, and prepare thyself for the search of their fathers!”
The alphabet which we had here, before the Roman abjectorium, is still preserved, and called Beth-luis-nion,[473] from the names of its first three letters, just as the English is denominated A B C, from a similar cause, and the Greek Alpha-bet from a like consideration.