Edward Clodd

“ Till then the veil of Isis hung over the significance of the inscriptions on coffin, sepulchral box, stele, tomb, obelisk, and temple, and over the interpretation of characters written on papyri rolls centuries before the foundations of Athens were laid. Of these records, be it noted, Death, which sweeps away man and the memory of him from his fellows, has been more than aught else—in Egypt, and indeed, all the world over, but notably in Egypt—the preserver. ”

“ Save in fragmentary echoes repeated by fugitive bards, the great epics of East and West would have perished, and the immortal literatures of successive ages never have existed. The invention of writing alone made possible the passage from barbarism to civilisation, and secured the continuous progress of the human race. ”

“ The various derived scripts—Umbrian, Oscan, Etruscan, and others—have all, the Latin alone excepted, passed away. The ultimate dominance of the Latins brought about the abolition of every [Pg 217] other alphabet than their own, which, becoming the alphabet of the Roman Empire, and then of Christendom, secured an everlasting supremacy. It was the vehicle of Greek and Roman culture to Western Europe; it is the vehicle of all the culture of the progressive races of the world. Although essentially identical with the Greek, it took its own line, and that, compared with the Slavonic, a simple one. ”

“ Side by side with formulæ embodying superstitions common to barbaric folk all the world over, we find penitential psalms, appeals to the great gods, and spiritual utterances, some of which are on a plane with Hebrew sacred poetry. All this body of literature, secular and sacred, made up the vast store of books in the libraries whose interpretation is one of the brilliant successes of modern scholarship, and whose contents bring home to us the priceless value of the art of writing to mankind. ”

“ In the extraordinary manifestations of artistic genius to which, at widely remote periods and under the most diverse political conditions, the later populations of Greece and Italy have given birth, may we not be allowed to trace the re-emergence, as it were, after long underground meanderings, of streams whose upper waters had seen the daylight of that earlier world? ”

“ We have only to assume the absence of any medium whereby we could communicate with friends at a distance, or whereby the now complex and countless dealings between man and man could be set down and every transaction thus "brought to book," to realise the hopeless tangle of our social life. All that memory failed to overlap would be an absolute blank; the dateless and otherwise uninscribed monuments which the past had left behind would but deepen the darkness; all knowledge of the strivings and speculations of men of old would have been unattainable ”

“ But man at the same stage of culture being everywhere practically the same, there is, in the paucity of examples from the Europe of the past, compensation in the specimens of graphic art found among extant barbaric folk. It is probable that a good proportion of these lack significance, but the pictograph is the parent of the alphabet, and therefore the careful transcripts of rock and other paintings which explorers have made may yet prove to be of value when interpreted in the light of examples whose gradations have been traced. ”

“ The emotions which Herodas delineates are not Greek, but human, and no preliminary cramming in archæology is necessary for their appreciation. As the world was never young, so it will never grow old. The archæologist devotes years of research to [Pg 203] compiling a picture of Greek life, and the result is Charicles—a cold and unrelieved mass of 'local colour.' There is no proportion, no atmosphere, no background; all is false save the details, and they merely overload the canvas. ”

“ In the case of Babylon we have seen that the art of writing—that index of culture—had passed the pictographic stage long before eight thousand years ago, while the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which probably came in with the dynasties, and therefore date from the reign of Menes, the first historical king, are some thirteen hundred years later, so far as their use in the Nile Valley is concerned. Hence the Babylonian script carries the palm in point of age. ”

“ Water is the birthplace of civilisation, as of life itself, and the original home of the Ægean or Mycenæan civilisation is probably to be found in the island of Crete. It is crammed with remains of pre-Hellenic culture. It is a big stepping-stone from Greece to Asia Minor, Karpathos and Rhodes lying between. It is in the line of communication with Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt on the East, and with Sicily and the coastlines of the Western Mediterranean. The earliest Greek tradition looks back to Crete "as the home of divinely inspired legislation and the first centre of maritime dominion." ”

“ They got rid of surplus signs, of the lumber of determinatives and the like, and invented an alphabet which if it was not perfect (as no alphabet can be, because the letters are not revised from time to time to represent changes in sound) , was of such signal value as to have been accepted by the civilised world of the past, and to have secured, with but slight modifications, a permanence assured to no other invention of the human race. Therefore, the debt that we owe these old traders is in nowise lessened because the current theory of derivation of our alphabet is doubted. ”

“ Wallis Budge:—
"If this writing be known (by the deceased) upon earth, and this chapter be done into writing upon (his) coffin, he shall come forth by day in all the forms of existence which he desireth, and he shall enter into (his) place, and be not rejected. Bread and ale and meat shall be given unto Osiris, the scribe Ani upon the altar of Osiris ... there shall wheat and barley be given unto him; there shall he flourish as he did upon earth, and he shall do whatsoever pleaseth him, even as do the gods who are in the underworld, for everlasting millions of ages, world without end." ”

“ But the excerpts—varied enough—already given will suffice to indicate what wealth of literature for our knowledge of the past these venerable relics yield, and how poor beyond redemption would the world be if shorn of those records of human thought and feeling, of those grave and gay pictures of life, so closely resembling our own, whereby, too, we learn how superficial have been the changes in human nature throughout the ages of man's tenancy of the earth. ”

“ Out of one or another of its triads emerged the dogma of the Christian Trinity, and in the child Horus, seated in the lap of Isis, we see the profound significance of the words, "Out of Egypt have I called my Son." The obelisk that fronts St. Peter's at Rome symbolises the historical fact that approach to the Christian Church is through the pronaos of the Egyptian temple.
Explorations in Greece and the surrounding archipelago within the last few years have brought to light a third venerable centre of culture. ”

“ CHAPTER II THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET
We may, without further preface, advance to our main purpose, which is to supply an account of the stages through which the alphabets of the civilised world passed before they reached their, practically, final form. Here, as in aught else that the wit of man has devised and the cunning of his hand applied, the law of development is seen at work. ”

“ D. G. Hogarth, to show that "man in Hellas was more highly civilised before history than when history begins to record his state; and there existed human society in the Hellenic area, organised and productive, to a period so remote that its origins were more distant from the age of Pericles than that age is from our own. We have probably to deal with a total period of civilisation in the Ægean not much shorter than in the Nile Valley." ”

“ THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY
"What is ever seen is never seen," and it may be questioned if one in ten thousand of the readers of to-day ever pauses to ask what is the history of the conventional signs called the Alphabet, which, in their varying changes of position, make up the symbols of the hundred thousand words and more contained in a comprehensive dictionary of the English tongue. ”

“ Limited as is the number of stones that we have to draw from, it will be found that certain symbols are continually recurring, as certain letters or syllables or words would recur in any form of writing. Thus the human eye appears four times and on as many different stones, the 'broad arrow' seven times, and another uncertain instrument eleven times. The choice of symbols is evidently restricted by some practical consideration, and while some objects are of frequent occurrence, others equally obvious are conspicuous by their absence. ”

“ If we reject M. de Rougé's explanation of the origin of the alphabet, there is practically no rival theory on which to fall back. There are only three other possible sources, none of which can, at present, be regarded in any higher light than as a mere guess. If the Semitic letters were not derived from Egypt they must have been invented by the Phœnicians, or they must have been developed either out of the Hittite hieroglyphics, or out of one of the cuneiform syllabaries. ”

“ An age to which, more than to its predecessors, with their more sedate lives, "time is money," may appreciate what service they wrought who invented the few numerals, the relative places of which serve the purpose of recording the commerce of the world. ”

“ Additional indications, indeed, have come to light which carry back the chronology of the earlier relics of Cretan culture far beyond the date of Schliemann's great discoveries on the mainland of Greece, and attest an intercourse with Egypt going back to the third and, it may be, even the fourth millennium before our era. We have here in Crete the first stepping-stone of European civilisation. ”

“ That was the birth of the Alphabet, one of the greatest and most momentous triumphs of the human mind. The earliest phonograms represented syllables, not individual letters, the distinguishing signs for vowels and consonants being of yet later introduction; in fact, some alphabets, notably the Hebrew and other Semitic, have no true vowels, but only distinguishing marks, diacritical points as they are called, to denote them. To recapitulate, we have 1, picture-writing; 2, ideograms ”

“ Jesus saith, I stood in the midst of the world, and in my flesh I was seen of them, and I found all men drunken, not one found I thirsty among them; and my soul is weary for the sons of men, for they are blind in their heart, and see (not, poor and know not) their poverty. ”

“ Frazer aptly remarks that "the existence at this early date of a great maritime power in Crete, which by its central position between Greece and the empires of the East was well fitted to receive and amalgamate the characteristics of both, is just what is needed to explain the rise and wide diffusion of a type of civilisation like the Mycenæan, in which Oriental influences seem to be assimilated and transmuted by a vigorous and independent nationality endowed with a keen sense of its own for art. ”

“ But then God, loving the human race, had pity on the Slavonians, and sent them St. Constantine, the Philosopher, called Cyril, a just and true man, who made for them an alphabet of thirty-eight letters, of which some were after the Greek style, and some after the Slavonic language." The variety of sounds in Slavonic involved the addition of ten characters to Cyril's alphabet, and although that number was afterwards reduced, the Russian remains the most cumbersome and ungainly of alphabets. ”

“ One antiquary contended that they were talismanic signs; another that they were mystic formulæ of the priests, or astrological symbols of the old Chaldean star-worshippers; another saw in them a species of revealed digital language wherewith the Creator talked to Adam, whence the primitive speech of mankind was derived; while others conjectured them to be Chinese, or Samaritan, or Runic, or Ogam characters. Most fantastic of all, one ingenious theorist saw in them the action of numberless generations of worms! ”

“ But sufficing material survives for piecing together a narrative of the triumph of the human mind over one of the most difficult tasks to which it could apply itself; a task which, unwrought, would have made advance in the highest sense impossible beyond a certain point. ”

“ Overlaid with new elements, swamped in the dull, though materially higher, Neolithic civilisation, may not the old æsthetic faculties which made Europe the earliest-known home of anything that can be called human art, as opposed to mere tools and mechanical contrivances, have finally emancipated themselves once more in the Southern regions, where the old stock most survived? ”

“ There is no warrant for assuming entire effacement of one race, with resulting clear field for the immigration of another race; and modern archæological research is producing the links which connect the rude art of Northern with that of Southern Europe, and, what will be shown to be of great moment, with that of the Eastern Mediterranean. The examples of this must remain rare, since only pictographs on some durable material, or specimens of the fictile art, would survive the action of time. ”