Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 200

ORIGIN OF ALPHABET
199
that the great inventor used some of these signs, with which he was perfectly familiar, in the same way as he might have used the abovementioned Cretan signs.
Ideographic Theory
It has also been argued, by Sir John Evans from the possible resemblance of a few early alphabetic letters to the objects denoted by their names, that the letters were once pictures used as ideograms. A similar opinion was propounded in 1914 (Introduction à l'Ancient Testament, Lausanne, 1914, p. 32) by Lucien Gauthier. The intrinsic probability of some Egyptian or Babylonian influence forbids the postulate of a totally unknown ideographic system of which, moreover, no trace has come to us. But it is interesting to know that this theory was suggested
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Fig. 100-Egyptian-Cretan theory
seventy-four years ago, when knowledge of oriental epigraphy was extremely slight. However, the recent theory of the French scholar Maurice Dunand (see below), if acceptable, would at least partly confirm Evans's ingenuity.
Sinaitic Theory
The Egyptian view was revived in 1916 in papers published by the English Egyptologist Dr. A. H. Gardiner and by the late German Egyptologist K. Sethe, dealing with the early Sinaitic inscriptions partly discovered in 1904-5 by Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie; others have been found in the years 1927, 1929, 1930 and 1935: nearly fifty inscriptions are extant. These inscriptions are attributed by some scholars (Gardiner, Butin, and others) to the end of the twelfth dynasty, that is to the beginning