And the following are the inscriptions on the walls of Maes Howe:
The key to the cypher is here shown by the transverse stroke on the stem of the first letter to the left (A or æ).
forming an inceptive—“these runes.” In the word “Runar,” the left-hand branches are turned down by way of variety; of course the number is the same. Finally, it is interesting to compare this “Mushajjar” with a similar system, the Irish letters, which bear the names of trees. They are:
And even in the common runes, we may observe that there is only one (R) which is not composed of a rune-staff, supporting offsets disposed at various angles.
No. I., the Arabic form connected by horizontal base-lines, contains two sets of three, and four sets of four letters, read as usual in Semitic alphabets; beginning with Alpha and ending with Tau: it is in fact the Aleph-Tav of the Hebrews and of the older Arabs, as preserved in the numeral and chronological syllabarium “El Abjad.” I need hardly note that this was characteristic of the world-conquering Phœnician, that glorious gift to Greece, usually attributed to Cadmus (El Kadim, or the Ancient), and by us incongruously applied to our Aryan speech; a comparison of the sequences a, b, c, and d (Abjad), and k, l, m, and n (Kalaman) with any other system at once proves direct derivation. In the Pehlevi Mushajjar the letters, it will be seen, are not joined at the base, and sundry branches are formed in a different way.