At the same time the colonizing race might be employing and perfecting a totally different form of cursive writing for their own purposes of registration, etc. For instance: in Athens, where Euclid held an archonship in 403 B.C. and, during centuries, Pythagorean philosophers identified “earth with a cube, fire with a pyramid, air with an octahedron, water with an icosahedron, and the Sphere of the Universe with a dodecahedron,” and also taught that a point corresponds with the monad, both being indivisible; a line with the duad, etc., it is obvious that points, lines and geometrical figures must have been employed for the cursive registration of ideas. In a state, firmly established on fixed principles of numbers, the cursive registration of its subdivisions, by means of numbers only, was rendered possible and in such a community the necessity for cursive writing would be limited and perhaps be confined to the registration and identification of individuals, the reports of quantities of produce, etc.
The facts that the letters of the Greek alphabet possess fixed numerical values, and that the initial letters only of their tribal names were inscribed on the shields of Lacedæmonian, Sicyonian and Messenian warriors, for instance, appear to indicate that, at one time, each Greek tribal division possessed its cursive mark, a letter, which may have indicated, at the same time, a numerical division of the confederacy. To understand such cursive records it is evident that a knowledge of the numerical basis of the state would be indispensable and imperative and that this would be confined to the rulers only. My opinion that the Maya calculiform hieroglyphs constitute cursive notation relating entirely to the calendrical and governmental cyclical system and absolutely unintelligible without a knowledge of this, has already been partially referred to on pp. 242 and 244. From Mexican manuscripts, where individuals, by means of a number and a calendar sign, are linked to a division of the state, I hope yet to be able to clearly demonstrate the practical harmonious working of a machinery of state, established on a perfected numerical scheme, the cursive notation of which was extremely simple.
Meanwhile I offer the foregoing remarks as suggestions for future research and as an expression of my opinion that people, using geometrical and numerical cursive methods of notation in their own country, may have systematically employed the pictographic method in teaching their language to strangers and in establishing their civilization in foreign lands.
It is particularly interesting to learn from Professor Sayce (op. cit. p. 188), not only that Phœnician culture had been introduced among the rude tribes of Israel, but that the temple of Jerusalem was built by Phœnician artists after the model of a Phœnician one, the main features of which were the two columns or cones at the entrance and the brazen sea or basin, which rested on twelve bulls, this number agreeing with the number of Israelitic tribes and with tribal or caste divisions in other ancient centres of civilization. It is thus certainly suggestive to find the number twelve associated with the Phœnicians, to whom the spread of civilization in the Old World is attributed and whose predecessors, at the period of Babylonian culture, were, according to Professor Sayce, “solitary traders, who trafficked in slaves, in purple-fish ... and whose voyages were intermittent and private.”
... “Diodorus Siculus assigns to the Carthaginians the knowledge of an island in the ocean, the secret of which they reserved for themselves as a refuge to which they could withdraw should fate ever compel them to desert their African home. It is far from improbable that we may identify this obscure island with one of the Azores, which lies 800 miles from the coast of Portugal. Neither Greek nor Roman writers make any reference to them, but the discovery of numerous Carthaginian coins at Carvo, the northwesterly island of the group, leaves little room to doubt that they were visited by Punic voyagers.”—Sir Daniel Wilson. The lost Atlantis and other ethnographic studies. New York, 1892.
Quoted by O'Neil from Satow and Hawes' Hdbk. of Japan, 2nd ed. p. 39.
It is interesting to compare the following Japanese words with Miyauken:
MIYO=wonderful, admirable, secret, mysterious, holy.
MIYA=Shinto temple where the kami are worshipped. Japan.
MIYUKI=travelling, going, only applied to circuit of provinces performed by Mikado.