The Reign of the Manuscript

by Perry Wayland Sinks

The earliest alphabetic document, in a language that is decipherable, and the date of which is approximately determinable, is the famous Moabite Stone. This relic of the remote past was discovered in 1868 among the ruins of Dibon by Dr. Klein, a missionary of the Church of England while touring in the region once known as the land of Moab, and whence its designation. The Moabite Stone is a slab of black basalt, nearly four feet high and two feet wide, rounded at the top, and contains an inscription of thirty-four lines cut in Phœnician characters. It is ascribed to the first half of the ninth century B. C. The Stone was intact when discovered though it suffered an attempted destruction by Arabs before it could be removed to a place of safety. The preserved fragments contain six hundred and sixty-nine characters, and many additional characters have been restored from the surviving portions. The inscription on the Stone contains the account of Mesha's breaking away from the rule of Israel and gives striking corroboration of the scripture record (II Kings 3:4-27) and recounts that the king Mesha, after Ahab's death, "rebelled against the king of Israel." "The whole inscription," says Professor Sayce, "reads like a chapter from one of the historical books of the Old Testament. Not only are the phrases the same, but the words and the grammatical forms are, with one or two exceptions, all found in scriptural Hebrew." He adds, further, "The Moabite Stone shows us what were the forms of the Phœnician letters used on the eastern side of the Jordan in the time of Ahab. The forms employed in Israel and Judah on the western side could not have differed much; and we may therefore see in these venerable characters the precise mode of writing employed by the earlier prophets of the Old Testament."[52]

But the surpassing interest which the Moabite Stone possesses for the antiquarian is not its corroboration of remote Israelitish history or the substantial identity of its letters with the Hebrew forms, but, rather, its contribution to all alphabetic literature of all the past. This will appear in a quotation from the late Wm. Frost Bishop, D.D.: "The essential features in the outline of each of our own letters may be detected easily in the characters of the Moabite Stone, written 2,900 years ago.... The primitive Semitic inscription of this stone contains the alphabet from which all existing alphabets have been derived. It exhibits the embryo forms of all the letters—2,000 or 3,000 in number—in every one of the alphabets which are now in use throughout the world. It might thus be termed the great mother alphabet of the world."[53] The Moabite Stone in itself would seem to indicate a more or less general as well as an understanding use of the alphabet in which it is inscribed throughout that region at an early date—perhaps at a much earlier date than that of the inscription—as the Code of Hammurabi, set up at Susa in Persia, indicates a more or less general acquaintance with the cuneiform characters in which the laws of that ancient monarch were promulgated. Supporting this conclusion, Mr. E. C. Richardson holds that there is "growing evidence of the prevailing use of handwriting all over Palestine, by not later than the ninth century."[54] Professor Sayce, referring to the criticism that would deny the pre-exilic origin of the larger part of the Old Testament literature on the ground that the early Israelites could not read or write, says: "This supposed late use of writing for literary purposes was merely an assumption, with nothing more solid to rest upon than the critic's own theories and prepossessions. And as soon as it could be tested by solid fact it crumbled into dust."[55]

Closely identified with the Moabite Stone, both in the time of its supposed production and in its alphabetic characteristics, is the Siloam Inscription at Jerusalem, laid bare to the world's gaze in 1881. The discovery of this valuable treasure of Palestinian records was due to fortuitous circumstances, as has been many another important "find." [A boy wading in the channel cut in the rock leading to the Pool first discovered the writing, partly concealed by water, on the southern wall of the channel.[56]] The Siloam Inscription, though brief—containing only six lines, with the writing partly destroyed—has great philological and historical value. According to the judgment of scholars this inscription was executed in the reign of King Hezekiah and may have been designed to celebrate and memorialize his distinguished achievement, recorded in scripture (II Chronicles 32:30). Its complete translation has been accomplished. The letters of this writing are held by some archæologists and philologists to exhibit, possibly, even older forms than those contained in the inscription of the Moabite Stone. The inscriptions are closely related. Of the Moabite Stone a Jewish writer holds that "the language, with slight deviation, is Hebrew, and reads almost like a chapter from the Book of Kings"; and, of the Siloam Inscription, that "it is pure Hebrew."[57]

(4) Classic writing. Each country and people has had a palæography, in some respects, of its own, and developed by its own individual history, although modified, often, by the adjacent countries and contemporaneous peoples. The palæography of a civilization is sometimes taken up by other civilizations and, in turn, may be transmitted as an inheritance to other generations. Almost every century has had its own specific "hand," and the "hand" throughout human history has constantly undergone change. Sometimes the change has been for the better; at other times the change has been for the worse; the change in handwriting going on at the present time can hardly be accredited for the worse, and for the reason that, speaking inclusively, it now seems to have attained unto the superlatively bad. "Handwriting, like every other art, has its different phases of growth, perfection, and decay. A particular form of writing is gradually developed, then takes the finished or calligraphic style and becomes the 'hand' of the period; then deteriorates, breaks up, and disappears, or drags out only an artificial existence—being superceded, meanwhile, by another 'hand' which, either developed from an older hand or introduced independently, runs the same course and, in its turn, is displaced by a younger rival."[58] The "Spencerian" and the "vertical" hands are well-known and present-day applications of this law of change or development in the form of written language.

(5) The two great stages of classic writing. Another fact concerning palæography merits more than a passing notice—it is the two great stages of the classical writing. The Greek handwriting, in which much of the best classic literature was written (in which the New Testament, with the possible exception of Matthew's gospel, and the Old Testament of the Septuagint Version were written; and in which, furthermore, a large proportion of the writings by the early Christian teachers and apologists and also those of the heathen and heretical controversialists of the early centuries were written), passed through two clearly defined and distinctly separated stages, known, respectively, as the uncial and the minuscule "hands." The "uncial" was the large letter hand, and the dominant style from the time of the earliest written productions in Greek down to the ninth century. The "minuscule" (called also the "cursive") was the small letter or the "running" hand and continued in use, comprehensively, from the ninth century A. D. (though known earlier), when it largely displaced the "uncial" style, on, until the invention of printing superceded handwriting as the treasuring and disseminating medium of literary productions.

The difference in size and style of the letters was not the only nor, perhaps, the chief demarcation between these "hands"; there was a broad distinction also in the relation of the letters to one another. In the uncial hand each letter was separated from the other letters as in printing; but in the minuscule style the letters of words were joined together in a "running" hand as in modern writing, thus facilitating rapidity in the use of the pen. Capitalization was little regarded in the early centuries; and punctuation as a system was not known. These two distinctions of the uncial and the minuscule hands were applied also to the productions written in Latin, though the uncial characters gave place to the small letter or "current" hand at an earlier date among the Roman than among the Greek copyists. This was probably owing to the decadence of the Greek language and the consequent ascendency of the Latin.

The most important systems of writing, for many centuries—from a time long previous to the Christian Era and on throughout the Middle Ages—were those which employed the classic Greek and Latin alphabets, and in which the great body of the world's best literature was written. At least this was true within the bounds of Europe. With the declining literary importance of Alexandria came the growing prominence of the region north of the Mediterranean. The Greek alphabet and language held preëminence for centuries, beginning with Alexander's conquest and extending into the early Christian centuries when they were displaced, early in the Middle Ages, under the Latin ascendency. During the increasing domination of the Latin alphabet and literature, national and provincial "hands" were developed and came into active competition in the centuries previous to the invention of printing. The handwriting which was of specifically Roman lineage was gradually modified by environing conditions in the different sections of Europe and resulted in various "hands," as the "Lombardic" hand of Italy, the "Visigothic" hand of Spain, and the "Merovingian" and (later) the "Carolingian" hand of the Frankish Empire.

(6) The Anglo-Saxon writing. The Anglo-Saxon handwriting is an inheritance from the Latin national hand. In this "descent" (or, is it "ascent"?) of our modern English "hand," in the long process of its genealogy, the Latin displaced the earlier Greek, as the Greek had won its way over the still earlier Phœnician and Hebrew. In our modern English literature we employ the Roman alphabet (as other nationalities are coming more and more to do). The Roman characters, being descended immediately from the Latin, though modified more or less by the Norman domination and other factors, constitute what may be called the cosmopolitan alphabet of modern times. The characters used in our Anglo-Saxon writing have come to their present ascendency and increasing supremacy from two reasons in particular: First, because the Latin on which it was based was the language of the educated classes of all nations during the Middle Ages; and second—and probably chiefly—because the Roman characters are better adapted for rapid writing than were the severe though elegant letters of the Greek language. The shape of the Roman characters greatly facilitated the adoption of the "running" hand in the Latin literature.

Many changes other than those already alluded to have come about in the transmission of literature from age to age: Men at first wrote from right to left as the orientals still do. The peoples of early Greece first wrote, as the Chinese still do, perpendicularly to the page, and then from right to left; later, backward and forward from right to left and left to right as in case of furrows made by a side-hill plow; and lastly, from left to right as moderns do. We look for the beginning of the Hebrew Bible where our English Bible ends; and we read it from right to left and turn its pages from left to right. It is much the same with the Chinese books, except that the columns of reading matter extend downwards on the page from top to bottom and not crosswise to the page as in other languages.

(7) Palæography and the date of literary productions. The style and character of the handwriting is of great practical importance to literary criticism and has large historical value. A knowledge as to the history of the individual letters (and each individual letter of the alphabet has a history of its own, as to its genesis and development) and of the arrangement and the appearance of literary productions is of the utmost significance in ascertaining the age, meaning, and value of ancient documents. The style of handwriting, also, has a large place in determining the time or period when a manuscript was written, even when the date is not affixed, just as the spelling of words in our English tongue and the fashion of our typography—ever fluctuating at the demand of artistic taste or attractive appearance—helps to determine, in absence of the date of publication, the approximate time when a book was printed. Illustrative of this, the author once placed on his library shelves an attractive set of books which were represented at the time of purchase as "just from the press" but which he knew at the time were printed from plates made more than a dozen years before although they may have been "fresh from the press";—he knew it from the kind of type employed in their printing, or, more accurately speaking, he knew it from the peculiar quotation-marks used with that particular type, inasmuch as the style of quotation-marks used in those volumes had passed out of current use by printers and publishers some years previously, having had but a feeble tenure of existence. To realize at a glance the ever-changing style of type in modern printing, one needs but to turn the pages of type-manufacturing catalogues. In like manner, the style of handwriting in any language constitutes a kind of verisimilitude for the age of the written literature. Dr. Isaac Taylor has said, "The architecture of different periods is not more characteristic of the age to which it belongs, than is the style of writing in manuscripts, nor is there less of certainty in determining questions of antiquity in the one case than in the other."[59] As the periods of the "Doric," "Ionic," and "Corinthian" architectures are determinable approximately by their respective characteristics—so the time of a literary production is largely determined by the characteristics of the handwriting in which it is written. We quote the words of Professor Mahaffy: "The task of palæography is now changed. We have ample evidence of antiquity; we rather seek to distinguish the small peculiarities of ancient handwriting as to tell their age approximately when the writer has affixed no note of his own time. And this we do with wonderful certainty, because almost every century has its own hand so distinctly that even the man who attempts to copy older fashions can easily be detected by his want of freedom. Years ago I was shown, in the great library at Naples, a manuscript of this kind, apparently of the tenth century. After a few minutes' examination, though I had never before seen such a thing, I told the librarian that it seemed to me a careful copy of an old hand by a laborious scribe of later date. He was surprised, but then showed me, what he had intended to conceal, a note at the end dated 1450, showing that my guess was correct. This anecdote is quoted to show that the freedom of the hand, as well as the shape of the letters, must be carefully estimated and considered by the palæographer. By using a good microscope, un-steadiness of lines which escape the naked eye will become apparent; and this is now well known to those who have studied the detection of forgeries in criminal cases."[60]