CHAP. III.
Origin of Characters or Letters—Ethiopic the first Language—How and why the Hebrew Letter was formed.
The reader will observe what I have already said concerning the language of Habesh, or the Mingled Nations, that they have not characters of their own; but when written, which is very seldom, it must be by using the Geez alphabet. Kircher, however, says, there are two characters to be found in Abyssinia; one he calls the Sacred Old Syrian, the other the Vulgar, or Common Geez character, of which we are now speaking. But this is certainly a mistake; there never was, that I know, but two original characters which obtained in Egypt. The first was the Geez, the second the Saitic, and both these were the oldest characters in the world, and both derived from hieroglyphics.
Although it is impossible to avoid saying something here of the origin of languages, the reader must not expect that I should go very deep into the fashionable opinions concerning them, or believe that all the old deities of the Pagan nations were the patriarchs of the Old Testament. With all respect to Sanchoniatho and his followers, I can no more believe that Osiris, the first king of Egypt, was a real personage, and that Tot was his secretary, than I can believe Saturn to be the patriarch Abraham, and Rachel and Leah, Venus and Minerva. I will not fatigue the reader with a detail of useless reasons; if Osiris is a real personage, if he was king of Egypt, and Tot his secretary, they surely travelled to very good purpose, as all the people of Europe and Asia seem to be agreed, that in person they first communicated letters and the art of writing to them, but at very different, and very distant periods.
Thebes was built by a colony of Ethiopians from Sirè, the city of Seir, or the Dog Star. Diodorus Siculus says, that the Greeks, by putting O before Siris, had made the word unintelligible to the Egyptians: Siris, then, was Osiris; but he was not the Sun, no more than he was Abraham, nor was he a real personage. He was Syrius, or the dog-star, designed under the figure of a dog, because of the warning he gave to Atbara, where the first observations were made at his heliacal rising, or his disengaging himself from the rays of the sun, so as to be visible to the naked eye. He was the Latrator Anubis, and his first appearance was figuratively compared to the barking of a dog, by the warning it gave to prepare for the approaching inundation. I believe, therefore, this was the first hieroglyphic; and that Isis, Osiris, and Tot, were all after inventions relating to it; and, in saying this, I am so far warranted, because there is not in Axum (once a large city) any other hieroglyphic but of the dog-star, as far as I can judge from the huge fragments of figures of this animal, remains of which, in differrent postures, are still distinctly to be seen upon the pedestals everywhere among the ruins.
It is not to be doubted, that hieroglyphics then, but not astronomy, were invented at Thebes, where the theory of the dog-star was particularly investigated, because connected with their rural year. Ptolemy[257] has preserved us an observation of an helaical rising of Sirius on the 4th day after the summer solstice, which answers to the 2250 year before Christ; and there are great reasons to believe the Thebans were good practical astronomers long before that period[258]; early, as it may be thought, this gives to Thebes a much greater antiquity than does the chronicle of Axum just cited.
As such observations were to be of service for ever, they became more valuable and useful in proportion to their priority. The most ancient of them would be of use to the astronomers of this day, for Sir Isaac Newton appeals to these of Chiron the Centaur. Equations may indeed be discovered in a number of centuries, which, by reason of the smallness of their quantities, may very probably have escaped the most attentive and scrupulous care of two or three generations; and many alterations in the starry firmament, old stars being nearly extinguished, and new emerging, would appear from a comparative slate of the heavens made for a series of ages. And a Theban Herschel[259] would have given us the history of planets he then observed, which, after appearing for ages, are now visible no more, or have taken a different form.
The dial, or gold circle of Osimandyas, shews what an immense progress they had made in astronomy in so little time. This, too, is a proof of an early fall and revival of the arts in Egypt, for the knowledge and use of Armillæ had been lost with the destruction of Thebes, and were not again discovered, that is, revived, till the reign of Ptolemy Soter, 300 years before the Christian æra. I consider that immense quantity of hieroglyphics, with which the walls of the temples, and faces of the obelisks, are covered, as containing so many astronomical observations.
I look upon these as the ephemerides of some thousand years, and that sufficiently accounts for their number. Their date and accuracy were indisputable; they were exhibited in the most public places, to be consulted as occasion required; and, by the deepness of the engraving, and hardness of the materials, and the thickness and solidity of the block itself upon which they were carved, they bade defiance at once to violence and time.
I know that most of the learned writers are of sentiments very different from mine in these respects. They look for mysteries and hidden meanings, moral and philosophical treatises, as the subjects of these hieroglyphics. A sceptre, they say, is the hieroglyphic of a king. But where do we meet a sceptre upon an antique Egyptian monument? or who told us this was an emblem of royalty among the Egyptians at the time of the first invention of this figurative writing? Again, the serpent with the tail in its mouth denotes the eternity of God, that he is without beginning and without end. This is a Christian truth, and a Christian belief, but no where to be found in the polytheism of the inventors of hieroglyphics. Was Cronos or Ouranus without beginning and without end? Was this the case with Osiris and Tot, whose fathers and mothers births and marriages are known? If this was a truth, independent of revelation, and imprinted from the beginning in the minds of men; if it was destined to be an eternal truth, which must have appeared by every man finding it in his own breast, from the beginning, how unnecessary must the trouble have been to write a common known truth like this, at the expence of six weeks labour, upon a table of porphyry or granite.