As to the exact origin of this alphabet, modern scholars are still somewhat in doubt. The Greeks themselves ascribed its origin to the Egyptians, believing that the Phœnicians had adopted a modified alphabet from the hieroglyphics. There were others, however, among the ancients who ascribed the origin of the Phœnician alphabet not to Egypt, but to Babylonia, and curiously enough this discrepancy amongst ancient authorities is exactly matched by the discordant opinions of the scholarship of our own day. It is admitted on all hands that the Phœnicians did not themselves invent their alphabet. But whether the foundation upon which they built it was the hieroglyphic or hieratic script of the Egyptians, or the elaborate cuneiform syllabary of Mesopotamia, is not even now clearly established.
The theory of Egyptian origin found about the middle of the 19th century an able and strenuous advocate in the person of Viscount de Rougé, who elaborated the theory which specifically accounted, or attempted to account, for the different letters of the Phœnician alphabet as of Egyptian origin. He based his comparisons not upon the hieroglyphics, but on the modified forms of the hieratic script, believing with good reason that the Phœnicians obtained their alphabet at a very early date—perhaps something like 2000 B.C. He logically confined his analysis to an observation of the oldest specimens of the hieratic writings that were accessible, in particular using the Prisse Papyrus, which, as good fortune would have it, chanced to be written in a very clear, bold hand. This hieratic script, as is well known, follows the hieroglyphics themselves in using at once an alphabet, a syllabary, and a modified form of ideographs. It is one of the most curious facts in the history of human evolution that the Egyptians having advanced through the various stages of mental growth necessary to the evolution of an alphabet, should have retained the antique forms of picture writing and of syllabic representations of sounds after they had made the final analysis which gave them the actual alphabet, and that to the very last they should have used a jumble of the various forms of representation in all their writings. The feat of the Phœnicians, according to the theory of De Rougé, was to select from the Egyptian characters those that were purely, or almost purely, alphabetic in character, and recognising that these alone were sufficient, to reject all the rest. Simple as such a selection seems when viewed from the standpoint of later knowledge, it really must have required the imagination of the most brilliant genius to effect it.
The theory of De Rougé was so ably supported through comparison of the most ancient known inscriptions of the Phœnicians with the hieratic alphabet of the Egyptians that it was almost at once accepted by a large number of scholars, and for many years was pretty generally regarded as having solved the old-time puzzle of the origin of the Phœnician alphabet. More recently, however, the theory of De Rougé has been called in question and the old theory of Pliny, which ascribed the origin of the alphabet to the Babylonian script rather than the Egyptian, has been revived by modern archæologists. Professor Deecke attempted to derive the Phœnician alphabet from the later Assyrian. This attempt, however, has been characterised as refuting itself in the very expression, for it can hardly be in question that the Phœnician alphabet was in use long before the later Assyrian came into existence. A more logical attempt, however, has been made to draw a comparison between the Phœnician and the ancient Accadian, which was the classical speech of Mesopotamia and the model on which the later Assyrian itself was based. This theory, first suggested perhaps by Professor Wuttke, found an able advocate in Dr. J. P. Peters, and more recently has been sanctioned by the high authority of Professor Hommel. Their opinions on the other hand have been ardently combated by the advocates of the theory of De Rougé, and the subject is as yet too obscure and the data are too few for a final decision.
Whether the Phœnicians went to Egypt or to Mesopotamia, however, for their model, it is at least admitted on all sides that among this people originated the alphabet which was transmitted to the Greeks, and through the Greeks to all modern European nations. This fact should of itself suffice to give the Phœnicians a foremost place among the nations of antiquity, in the estimation of the modern critic.
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS; RELIGION
It is a curious fact that the nation to which all Europe owes its alphabet should have been the one which has left us the fewest written records of all of the great nations of antiquity. It is not at all in question that the Phœnicians first developed a purely alphabetical script and transmitted it to the Greeks, yet there are no written monuments of Phœnicia herself preserved to us that are as ancient by some five hundred years as the oldest records of Greece, that have been found in the ruins of her so-called Mycenæan period. Indeed, the oldest records of Phœnician life, at present known, do not come from the territory of Phœnicia proper, but from her colonies. This anomaly has been explained by saying that the Phœnicians were not essentially a monumental people. They were seemingly but little solicitous to preserve records of their national life, the reason being, no doubt, that such records among the early nations were almost solely actuated by the desire of a great conquering monarch to preserve the memory of his own fame. As Phœnicia had no great conquering monarchs, as her conquests were all peaceful ones, lacking the element of dramatic picturesqueness, there was no one who had a personal interest in engraving inscriptions to tell her story to posterity.
Even so great a feat as the invention of the alphabet was probably looked upon by the Phœnicians as more or less a natural development growing out of their contact with Egypt and Babylonia. And, indeed, it is not through the Phœnicians themselves, but through the Greeks, that we are informed of the fact that our alphabet is of Phœnician origin.
So far as one is able to picture the actual manners and customs of the Phœnicians, in the period of their greatest power, one must think of them essentially as a matter-of-fact manufacturing and commercial nation, living in a few relatively large cities, and sending out colonies from these cities whenever the growth of population made such extension seem necessary. Sidon and Tyre were alternately the cities of greatest influence, but neither one apparently was at any period a really great city as regards actual count of population. Tyre in particular had its most important part built upon a small island, which afforded it wonderful opportunities for defence, as such conquerors as Nebuchadrezzar and Alexander found to their cost.
But this island as explored by modern investigators has seemed to be so limited in size as to prohibit any thought that its population was ever large. And it at once becomes clear how necessary it was that colonies should be sent out from time to time, since the population of any prosperous country is constantly increasing. It has even been suggested that the main population of Tyre must, at any given period of its prosperity, have been necessarily absent from its island home on voyages of war or peace, since the restricted area of the island itself makes it difficult to account otherwise for the distribution of such a number of men as was necessary to the equipment of the Phœnician navies and trading fleets.
A nation of traders must necessarily have a high degree of intelligence of a practical kind, but it would seem that the culture of the Phœnicians did not greatly advance beyond this. Their religion was always apparently of a very crude oriental type, akin to that of the Babylonians and of the early Hebrews. In literature they apparently never ranked with these neighbouring nations. Indeed, if they produced at any time a literature of significance, all traces of it are now lost, except certain fragments of doubtful authenticity that have come to us through the Greeks; the most important of these being the alleged writings of Sanchoniathon, as translated into Greek by Philo Byblius, and preserved, in part, by Eusebius.[a]