By Henry Eckford.
Fifth Paper.
In tracing back our letters, we now have reached Chalkis, where the Phœnicians under Kadmus taught the Greeks their letters. A funny thing occurred to the wise men who ferreted out all these facts. They could read Greek, and they could read Hebrew, and the strange likeness between many of the names for the letters in the two languages made it certain that in some way they were related or connected. But what meant those letters on rocks, metal vases, and earthenware jars that we now call Phœnician? Single letters looked like Greek letters distorted; but the words would not read as Greek. Nor would they read as Hebrew, although the characters appeared to have some connection with Hebrew. Greek is written like our writing, from left to right; but Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian are written from right to left. So, in those languages a book begins where our books end. It was found, too, that the Hebrew writing now in use is very different externally from that used by David and Solomon, although the names and general shape of the letters are the same. Have you ever seen a Hebrew Bible? The alphabet in which the Old Testament was originally written looked very different from that which the Jews now use in their Bibles; it was much nearer the Phœnician in appearance.
For a long time it never dawned on men's minds that perhaps the Phœnician way of writing, from right to left, was not followed by the Greeks; but at last they remembered that in very early times the lines of Greek writing were made to read alternately from right to left and from left to right. Such inscriptions were called boustrephédon ("turning like oxen in plowing"), because the letters had to be read as the oxen move from furrow to furrow in the field that they plow, first one way, then the other. That gave the needed clew.
After all, if we do not connect letters one to the other, as in running handwriting, does it make much difference whether we set the separate letters down in a sequence which begins at the right and ends at the left, or in one that begins at the left and ends at the right? Some nations, like the Chinese and Tartars, find it convenient to write signs under each other. The Egyptians used to write in at least three several directions, namely, downwards, from right to left, and from left to right. Generally one can tell how to read hieroglyphs in Egyptian and Mexican manuscripts by noting the direction of the faces of animals and persons pictured, and then reading in the opposite direction. Sometimes Egyptian hieroglyphs were engraved one upon the other, like a monogram.
Well, putting some or all of these facts together, it suddenly flashed on some one that the oldest Greek letters might be nothing more or less than the Phœnician letters turned the other way. And when they came to examine the very oldest Greek inscriptions to be found, they discovered that this was the main difference between the two! The Greeks had borrowed the Phœnician letters and merely added some new characters to express sounds peculiar to their own tongue and neglected others that were of no service.
It was this alphabet that the Greek-Phœnicians brought to Italy. When, centuries later, Latins and Sabines and Etruscans and Oscans, banded together and formed the great city of Rome, it was this alphabet they inherited from their forefathers. Several of the letters which the Etruscans thought necessary to express sounds in their language, were dropped before the Romans came to power and produced their great poets and essayists.
So, now you know how the alphabet came to you, which the Irish monks taught our heathen forefathers. It came through the Latins from the people of Bœotia, or Greeks, who learned it from the Phœnicians.
But that great mercantile people, the Phœnicians, also left to the nations near their old home in Palestine, the same precious gift of an alphabet. Very old inscriptions in Hebrew, lately found, are seen to be written in almost the same alphabet as the Phœnician. Perhaps you are beginning to wonder how many peoples there are who owe their letters to that old sea-folk who were the traders, pirates, and buccaneers of the Mediterranean! There is the Hebrew, which people have called the alphabet of God, because the Holy Scriptures were written in it, and which was also used by magicians for their amulets and talismans; there is the Greek, in which the epics of Homer, the long poems of Hesiod, and the rhapsodies of Pindar were taken down; there is the Latin, in which all the wisdom of the ancients reached us; and there are all the differing alphabets, printed characters, and script handwritings of Europe and America! In fact, I could not tell you here, so numerous are they, the names of all the languages in Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, that were and are written in some alphabet, which traces its descent from the twenty-two Phœnician letters.
The connection between Greek and Phœnician is much easier to believe than that Arabic, a sentence of which you see here represented, should be also a writing derived from the Phœnician. Arabic letters are used by so large a portion of the inhabitants of the earth that it stands second among the great national, or rather, the great religious alphabets of the world. Some of you know, I suppose, that Mohammed was a very wise and imaginative Arab of an important though poor tribe of Arabia Felix. He was a great poet and statesman; he had visions and called himself the Prophet of God. He wrote the Koran, which is used by an immense multitude of men as their only law-book and Bible. The dialect which he and his clan used became, through the spread of his doctrines, the standard, first for all Arabia, and then for all the enormous countries a hundred times larger than Arabia which his disciples and their followers won by force of arms.