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CHAPTERI
ORIGIN OF ALPHABET
THE PROBLEM
A LEARNED professor said to me once: "I have been told that you are dealing with the history of the alphabet. Can you tell me which alphabet you meanthe Egyptian, the Hebrew, the Latin, the Arabic, the Chinese?" I explained to him-as I have done in the Introduction to this book-why the Egyptian, the Chinese and other similar systems of writing should not be termed alphabets. And I added that in dealing with the history of the alphabet, I include all the alphabets, because all of them probably derived from one original alphabet.
The word alphabet appears in Latin alphabetum. It was mentioned first by Tertullian (ca. A.D. 155-230) and by St. Jerome (ca. 340-420), The Greeks, who used in classical times the word to grămma (generally in plural, ta grammata). adopted later, probably under Latin influence, the word he or he alphabetos. Etymologically, the word "alphaber" does not present any difficulty, it is derived from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. These names, however, and most of the other names of the Greek letters, with the exception of the additional ones, such as Epsilon, omikron, omega, phi, and psi are, as far as they have any meaning or a more or less known etymology, of Semitic origin, although the Semitic names (as we shall see below) are not identical.
The story of the alphabet from the end of the second millennium B.C. until to-day is, on the whole, not very hard to trace, though many details, and the origins of some scripts are still uncertain. It is its pre- and proto-history that is still wrapped in obscurity. The principal problem, still unsolved, is that of its origin. I have dealt with this particular problem in an article, The Origins of the Alphabet "ANTIQUITY," Vol. XVII, pp. 77-90, June, 1943. (I wish to thank its Editor, Mr. Roland Austin for having allowed me to reproduce the illustrations here.)
Since classic times, this problem has been a matter of serious study. The Greeks and Romuns held five conflicting opinions as to who were the inventors of the alphabet: the Phoenician, the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Cretan, and the Hebrew, and in modern times, various theories, some not very different in part from those of ancient days, have been current. Each country situated in, or more or less near to the eastern Mediterranean, has been seriously regarded as a claimant. Other theories-some influenced by political considerations--need not be seriously treated.
Egyptian Theory The earliest modern view, already held by previous scholars, was that of Lenormant, published by De Rougé in 1874, that Egypt was the starting place of the alphabet. The Egyptian theory has been subdivided into three theories; the hieroglyphic-Champollion. Lenormant, Halévy (Fig. 98, 1); the hieratic-Luzzatto, De Rougé, Taylor (Fig. 98, 2), Kyle, and, more recently, Montet, Mallon, Ullman and Ronzevalle; the demotic - Bauer; the last cannot be taken seriously, because the demotic script
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