73 CHAPTER VII. WRITING OF THE PHOENICIANS—FORMATION OF THE FIRST PURE ALPHABET, THE PARENT, THROUGH THE GREEK AND ROMAN, OF OUR OWN. I HAVE described the Assyrian and Persepolitan systems of writing before the Phoenician, both as forming, in that position, better connecting links in the regular order of the development of the art, and because the Assyrian and Persian monuments hold a higher chronological position than any as yet discovered of Phoenicia. It is nevertheless possible, and probable, that the Phoenicians formed a system of writing based upon that of Egypt, at the time the Phoenician shepherds ruled in the land of the Pharaohs, and even at that early period perfected an alphabetic system of writing. Tacitus, for instance, tells us that the Phoenicians learned the art of writing from the Egyptians, and carried it to all other nations: and the opinion of such a man as Tacitus, so cautious in all he advances, and so accurate in the manner in which he expresses all that he states, is worthy of the highest respect. The degree of analogy discoverable between the oldest Phoenician inscriptions and the latest writing of the Egyptians, in a degree bears out the assertion; especially if it were proved that in founding a system of writing upon that of the Egyptians, they took the phonetic portion of the system alone, and entirely remodelled and simplified the characters themselves, reducing them at once to a perfect alphabetic method, both as to their distinct phonetic capacity, and as to their simple and arbitrary forms; which, if it were so, would be one of the greatest intellectual advances ever achieved, as it were, at one bound. At the same time, this sudden advance is possible; for the true phonetic principle already existed in the Egyptian system of which it formed the simplest, and even the largest portion, and may thus have been found, on the transfer of the art to the use of a people speaking another language, the only one easily and completely convertable to its new purpose. It is clear that the phonetic signs alone of the Egyptian system would be amply sufficient to express all the sounds of the language for the notation of which we are supposing them about to be adopted, without the cumbrous appendages of the other classes of signs, with which they were originally combined. That a very small number of purely soundexpressing characters, if well selected, are sufficient to express the whole of the distinct sounds of any language is self-evident; and the fact is strikingly illustrated by the consideration, that only seven notes express all the endless combinations of sound and harmony required in the most elaborate compo L sitions of modern music. But the restricted number of the characters of our own alphabet forms, perhaps, a more apposite illustration; for, according to the mathematician Jacquet, twenty-four letters are capable of forming 620,448,401,733,239,439,360,000 distinct combinations, a number which the Jesuit Clavius, by a different process, makes but little less. Many peculiarities of the mythology of the Phoenician people would induce us to accept Egypt as the parent of all their arts of civilisation; and the following passage, from their sacred historian Sanchoniatho, distinctly points to the Egyptian origin of Phoenician letters. It is one of the few fragments of his works preserved, and is to the following general effect. The Phoenicians received the art of writing from Taaud (no other than the Egyptian Thoth), who was descended from Protogonus, the first man, and Æon (life), the first woman, whose children, genus and genta, dwelt in Phoenicia, and were the ancestors of Taaud, descended from them in the following line: 1. Protogonus. 2. Genus. 3. Uriphos. 4. Capus. 5. Hypsurarius. 6. Agreus. 7. Chryson. 8. Techrites. 9. Agrovenus (Noah). This fragment of Sanchoniatho of Berytus has been preserved in the works of Eusebius. He is said to have compiled his history from the registers furnished him for that purpose by Jerombalus, priest of the god Jevo, and other such records. Josephus informs us that such records were preserved in the inner part of the temples with great vigilance, as containing the most memorable events connected with the hierarchy and the national history. The remarkable coincidences, yet differences, with the Mosaic records contained in the passage above quoted cannot fail to be observed, and have no doubt been the cause of the work of Sanchoniatho being treated as the impudent forgery of Philon Byblius, through whose Greek translation the work in question, on the Theology of the Phoenicians, was known to the ancient writers, who have quoted passages from it. Porphyrius, Eusebius, Athenæus, Lindus, and other ancient writers by whom the work is mentioned, do not breathe a suspicion of its being a forgery; and all it asserts is in sufficient accordance with other Phoenician, as well as Egyptian, traditions to entitle it to respect. Whether, however, it be the work of a person named Sanchoniatho, or whether it was an ancient record of the Phoenician sacred laws under the name of San-chon-iath, an etymology hinted at by Athenæus, is unimportant, and does not impugn the good faith of Philon, who might easily have mistaken the title of the records for the name of the author. However the case may be, it is an interesting passage as connected with the history of letters, but is not essential, as evidence, of the Egyptian origin of the Phoenician characters, though affording additional testimony to the assertions of other authors, and the more solid evidence of monuments. It appears pretty evident that the Phoenicians preceded the Hebrews in the knowledge of letters; for, located upon the coast of Asia Minor, and near neighbours of the Jews, they have left monuments of the art of writing in the peculiar character of their nation, dating several centuries prior to any Hebrew remains. It is most probable, and in accordance with the remarks of Tacitus, and the facts which have been here advanced, that in their active commercial enterprises they may have acquired the principles of the art in an imperfectly alphabetic form, either directly from the Egyptians, or through the medium of the Assyrians; and their having, in their trading voyages to other nations, communicated to them the art thus acquired, may be the cause of their receiving the credit of its first invention, so frequently awarded to them by many Greek and Roman writers. Leaving out of the question the claim of the Phoenicians to be the originators of the art, it appears, at all events, certain, that they were the people through whose means the wonderful invention of writing was disseminated in western Europe, and probably also in the East, where a Phoenicio-Semitic alphabet appears to have been the first to supersede the cumbrous forms of the cuneatic systems. The written monuments of this interesting people mark most of the traces of their progress in the West; they went forth, as it were, to civilise Europe through the medium of writing; and as they proceeded on their adventurous course westward, we find everywhere written monuments of their route. At Cyprus, at Athens, at Malta, in Sicily, and at Carthage, the eldest daughter of the Phoenician Tyr-also at Gades, the modern Cadiz, the first Phoenician colony in Spain-and still farther west, traces of Phoenician writing are found. In Italy, the Etruscan, the Samnite, and the Oscan inscriptions are all in a character closely allied to the pure Phoenician, and Italy has never sought to deny the source from which she derived the inestimable art, without which the eloquence of Cicero would have died with the tongue that gave it utterance, and the verses of Virgil and Horace would have been but recitations, forgotten after the generation to which they were addressed, or preserved only in vague traditions, like the supposed rhapsodies of Ossian, or the rude ballads of Wales. I have stated that the Phoenician mode of writing, if acquired in Egypt, consisted probably of a limited number of phonetic characters selected from the Egyptian scriptorial system, without reference to the pictorial origin. If this was the case they would soon lose all traces of their primitive forms, and become mere arbitrary signs, modified continually till they assumed the kind of forms most readily written. By this kind of transposition of a set of characters from one language to another, we obtain a striking glimpse of the manner in which a system of arbitrary signs grew out of pictorial ones, and finally throwing off with their pictorial forms their allegiance to art, became feudatories of history and science. We may imagine how they were eventually, as a last step, pagan worship at the time he attempted to re-establish polytheism, by reference to their ancient records, written in the Etruscan letters and language. It would appear, then, that the Etruscan language and letters were lost, like those of the Egyptians, at a comparatively recent period, both, no doubt, suppressed by the rapidly-rising Christian hierarchy, which found the ancient systems of theology the most strongly rooted among the races still speaking antique dialects, who were thus comparatively uninfluenced by the more recently dominant languages, in which the tenets of the Latin and Greek Churches were conveyed. The series of alphabets in Plate V. exhibits the near relationship of the Phoenician, Greek, and early Roman letters, which will be more fully alluded to in describing the Hebrew characters in the next chapter. But this seems to be the place to state simply, that the early alphabet of the Phoenicians appears to consist of a greater number of letters than was at first adopted from it by the Greeks, twenty-two characters having been, with tolerable certainty, verified, which appear to correspond to our A, B, G, D, H, V, Z, CH, TE, Y, KA, L, M, N, S, E, P, TZ, KO, R, SH, TAU, most of which will be found, on comparison of the series of alphabets in Plate V., to have been, through the medium of the Greek and Roman, the parents of our own letters. In concluding my observations on the Phoenician character, I should observe, that while we deny the Phoenicians the credit of inventing an art which seems evidently borrowed from Egypt or Assyria, Europe was yet immediately indebted to Phoenicia for the introduction of that important art; and the whole of Asia Minor, and Greece also, remembered without thought of evasion the Phoenician gift of letters, which many Grecian writers have recorded; and oral tradition still preserves the recollection of the fact. The date at which the Phoenicians first achieved the creation of a pure phonetic alphabet must at present remain matter of conjecture; but if the Greek claim to the possession of the art of writing prior to the siege of Troy, 1150 B.C., be a valid one, then the Phoenician system, which was certainly the parent of that of Greece, must have been in use at least thirteen or fourteen centuries before the Christian era; and supposing that the writing of the Jews in the time of Moses was a phonetic system, and that the Phoenician alphabet preceded it, the fifteenth or sixteenth century before the Christian era must be allowed as the date of the most ancient Phoenician alphabet. The next interesting point in the progress of the art of writing towards complete perfection, is its further development among the Greeks; for much yet remained to be effected, as both in the Phoenician, and in the Hebrew, which will form the subject of the next chapter, the vowels are, except as initials, carried, as it were, by the consonants; a method by which those systems become partly syllabic in their arrangement; that is to say, not strictly and separately literal,—a defect nearly, if not entirely, excluded from the alphabet of the Greeks. |