1. The Origin of Letters.--2. The Phoenician Alphabet and Inscriptions.-- 3, The Greek Alphabet. Its Three Epochs.--4. The Medieval Scripts. The Irish. The Anglo-Saxon. The Roman. The Gothic. The Runic.
1. THE ORIGIN OF LETTERS.--Alphabetic writing is an art easy to acquire, but its invention has tasked the genius of the three most gifted nations of the ancient world. All primitive people have begun to record events and transmit messages by means of rude pictures of objects, intended to represent things or thoughts, which afterwards became the symbols of sounds. For instance, the letter _M_ is traced down from the conventionalized picture of an owl in the ancient language of Egypt, _Mulak_. This was used first to denote the bird itself; then it stood for the name of the bird; then gradually became a syllabic sign to express the sound "mu," the first syllable of the name, and ultimately to denote "M," the initial sound of that syllable.
In like manner _A_ can be shown to be originally the picture of an eagle, _D_ of a hand, _F_ of the horned asp, _R_, of the mouth, and so on.
Five systems of picture writing have been independently invented,--the Egyptian, the Cuneiform, the Chinese, the Mexican, and the Hittite. The tradition of the ancient world, which assigned to the Phoenicians the glory of the invention of letters, declared that it was from Egypt that they originally derived the art of writing, which they afterwards carried into Greece, and the latest investigations have confirmed this tradition.
2. THE PHOENICIAN ALPHABET.--Of the Phoenician alphabet the Samaritan is the only living representative, the Sacred Script of the few families who still worship on Mount Gerizim. With this exception, it is only known to us by inscriptions, of which several hundred have been discovered. They form two well-marked varieties, the Moabite and the Sidonian. The most important monument of the first is the celebrated Moabite stone, discovered in 1868 on the site of the ancient capital of the land of Moab, portions of which are preserved in the Louvre. It gives an account of the revolt of the King of Moab against Jehoram, King of Israel, 890 B.C. The most important inscription of the Sidonian type is that on the magnificent sarcophagus of a king of Sidon, now one of the glories of the Louvre.