APPENDIX.

THE ORIGIN OF ALPHABETICAL WRITING.

We designate by ALPHABET the series of characters of the different peoples, which represent the sounds and articulations of their language.

The first representations of thought by characters were ideographic hieroglyphics, in which the pictures of animals or other objects of nature or of human industry were symbols of ideas, without any of the connecting links of language. The written language of the Indians of North America was largely ideographic. This mode of representing thought was very imperfect. It could represent only a limited number of ideas, and that by great labor and much inexactness. It was limited to the material order of things; it could not represent an abstract idea, nor could it join thought to thought in logical sequence. The imperfection of this mode of writing gradually moved the inventive mind of man to improve it, so that the pictures of similar objects should stand as conventional signs of the different sounds of the voice, and thus the ideographic evolved into the phonetic. In the Assyrian cuneiform writing, the conventional signs were taken to represent syllables; they did not carry the analysis of the voice further. But the Egyptians analyzed the voice into its radical sounds, and invented symbols for all. This mode of writing existed with the Egyptians more than 3000 years before our era. It was of three kinds, Hieroglyphic, Hieratic and Demotic.

The Hieroglyphic proper represented the sound by the correct outlines of some object, in whose name the initial sound corresponded to the sound of which it was to be a symbol. The Eagle, whose initial letter is A in Egyptian, was a symbol for the letter A.

The Hieratic mode of writing, employed for state papers, differed from the Hieroglyphic only inasmuch as the outlines of the objects were not observed with such fidelity, but were simplified to accelerate the writing.

The Demotic is a further abbreviation and simplification of the Hieratic, made use of by the common people. The Hieroglyphic proper appears on the monuments; the other two in papyrus MSS.

Together with these phonetic symbols they retained certain ideographic signs, and others that represented syllables.

The Egyptian hieroglyphics by no means constituted a perfect system. They were rather a confused medley of different kinds of signs. The Phenicians came upon this chaos of language symbols, and catching the idea of the Egyptians, they eliminated what was useless, and built upon the original idea the alphabet properly so called:

"Phoenices primi, famæ si creditur, ausi
Mansuram rudibus vocem signare figuris."

-Lucan, Pharsalia, III. 220-221.

The remarkable genius of this people appears in the fact that they chose only the necessary characters from the confused mass of the Egyptians. They chose twenty-two consonant letters, and rejected the rest as superfluous. The one imperfection of the Phenician alphabet, was the absence of vowel signs. We find the first invention of vowels with the Greeks. But the Phenicians had really invented that which was principal, and were the first among the races of men to employ a purely phonetic mode of writing. The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia are not properly alphabetical. Excepting these, all the alphabets of the globe, of which we have knowledge, are derived from the characters of the Phenician merchants of the world. M. de Rougé and M. Lenormant have demonstrated that the Phenicians based their alphabet not on the hieroglyphic symbols, but on the hieratic characters, as they were more adapted to cursive writing. The date of the Phenician invention can not be fixed with certainty, but it is placed before the period of Moses in Egypt. The Egyptians, though a people of great culture and wise institutions, were not a commercial people. The Phenician merchants at an early date entered into commercial relations with this people, and from this came the evolution of the rude symbols of the Egyptians into the perfect alphabet of the Phenicians.

The annexed plates, from M. Vigouroux's Dictionnaire de la Bible, illustrate the development of alphabetical writing from the Hieroglyphics of the Egyptians.

The decipherment of the hieroglyphics of Egypt is the achievement of Jean François Champollion the younger (17901832). This gifted scholar in his short life accomplished one of the greatest of human discoveries, and with his dying voice he delivered to his fellow-man the discoveries of his genius. The importance of his discovery is very great. Egypt was a

land of great culture and civilization in the remotest times. The Lawgiver of Israel was taught by them. Their institutions were wise, and their laws were just. Moreover, it was the nursery of the Hebrew people, and the sojourn in Egypt stamped a certain characteristic on the religious and civil life of Israel.

But the key to Egypt's lore had been lost, and the message of the hieroglyphs was locked in mystery. M. Brugsch Bey, estimates the number of these hieroglyphs to be more than three thousand.

M. Champollion, after a successful study of the Coptic tongue, entered upon the great task of unraveling the Egyptian mystery.

In 1799, the French lieutenant of artillery, M. Bouchard, while establishing the Fort St. Julian at Rosetta in Egypt, discovered what has since become famous as the Rosetta stone. This stone is of Egyptian basalt, about ten feet in height by three and a half in width. It is mutilated about the angles. The stone is at present in the British Museum. It was translated by Birch in Records of the Past, Vol. IV.

The Rosetta stone bears an inscription in three columns. The first column is hieroglyphic, the second demotic, the third Greek. The inscription contains a decree of the priests of Egypt, in honor of Ptolemy Epiphanes, directing that a statue be erected in his honor in the temples, and that he should receive divine honors. At the same time in the Isle of Philae, near Assouan, in Upper Egppt, a smaller inscription in hieroglyphics and Greek had been found, which aided Champollion in his decipherment. It was the usage of the Egyptians to write the name of the royal personages on Cartouches. In the Greek column of the bilingual monument of Philae, the name of Cleopatra was engraven in Greek, in the Greek column of the Rosetta stone, the name of Ptolemy existed in similar mode of writing. Champollion also observed that corresponding to these two names were two cartouches in the hieroglyphs, and he drew the conclusion that the signs in these cartouches corresponded to the Greek letters. This illation was confirmed by the fact, that there are five letters in ΚΛΕΟΠΑΤΡΑ and ΠΤΟΛΕΜΑΙΟΣ which are identical. The five letters corresponded to five signs which are identical in the cartouches.

The annexed plate reproduces the cartouches of Cleopatra and Ptolemy with Champollion's system of interpretation. We are indebted for this plate to M. Vigouroux in La Bible et les Découvertes Modernes.