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THE ALPHABET staunch defendants in great authorities on the subject, such as the English Semitist Cook, the French orientalists Dussaud and Schæffer, the German Egyptologist von Bissing, the Finnish archæologist Sundwall, the Dutch theologian de Groot, the late German authority on the alphabet Hans Bauer, the American Professor R. P. Blake, the young German scholar Schott, and some others, amongst them the author of this book. Dunand, too, attributes the invention of the alphabet to a Semitic school or a person of high authority, and believes that Byblos may be considered as the seat of the invention of the alphabet. However, the exact birthplace of the alphabet is unknown; the names of two towns, Qiryat Sepher, the "City of the Letter" (in Palestine), and Byblos, the "Book-town" (in Syria), are significant, but no evidence is available as yet,
INFLUENCE OF OTHER SYSTEMS
The present hypothesis leaves sufficient room for the influence of the older systems, the Egyptian, the cuneiform, the Cretan, and perhaps also of the prehistoric geometric signs. It is unlikely that the inventors were without precedent, and it is extremely improbable that an alphabet invented in Palestine or Syria in the second millennium B.C., was uninfluenced by the scripts of Egypt, Babylonia or Crete. Only in this way, the "polygenetic" theory of the origin of the alphabet, propounded by Delitzsch fifty years ago and in 1931/2 by Lindblom, can be considered as acceptable. Both the conception of consonantal writing and the acrophonic principle (if it existed in the proto-Semitic alphabet) may have been borrowed from Egypt. The influence of the Babylonian writing may be traced in the names of some letters. The influence of the Cretan scripts and of the prehistoric geometric signs may be purely external, affecting the form of some letters. Other alphabetic signs may have originated in conventional symbols, and it may be supposed that they were mainly arbitrary inventions.
DECISIVE ACHIEVEMENT
At any rate, it must be said that the great achievement of the invention was not the creation of the signs. It lies in the adoption of a purely alphabetic system, which, moreover, denoted each sound by one sign only. For this achievement, simple as it not seems to us, the inventor, or the in are to be ranked among the greatest benefactors of mankind. No other people in the world has been able to develop a true alphabetic writing. The more or less civilized peoples of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Crete, Asia Minor, Indus Valley, China, Central America, reached an advanced stage in the history of writing, but could not get beyond the transitional
