Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

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

Page 514

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IX
513
This problem has been hotly discussed by scholars and others. The theory of the Urrunen (that is, the forerunners of the runes), a supposed prehistoric German nordic alphabetic script, the parent of the runes and of all the Mediterranean alphabets alike, including the Phoenician, is based on racial and political grounds, and need not be taken into serious consideration. We do not, however, exclude the possibility that the ancient Teutons may have occasionally employed, as other primitive peoples did, certain symbols for magic divination and for religious purposes, and for note in balloting, as Tacitus (Germania, ch. X) termed them, but such symbols were not a true script, and their influence on the origin of the alphabetic runes might prove, at the very most, to be purely external.
The thorny, elongated and angular shapes of the runes, which look as though they belonged to the seventh or sixth century B.C., and the direction of writing of the earlier runic inscriptions (either from right to left, or boustrophedon) induced the great Isaac Taylor to suggest as the prototype of the runes the Greek alphabet as used in the sixth century B.c. in the Greek colonies of the Black Sea, and the Goths living at that period in southern Russia as the inventors of the runic alphabet. This theory, however, although endorsed by many other scholars, cannot be accepted because of the time-lag. Indeed, there is no evidence for the existence of the runes previous to the Christian era. For the same reason we must reject another theory, which, while accepting the view that the runic character was invented in the region of the Black Sea, suggests that it descended not directly from a Greek, but from an Asianic source (see the previous Chapter).
Some scholars propounded the Greek cursive alphabet of the last centuries B.C. as the parent of the runes, and the Celts as the mediators, but there is no evidence for these assertions.
Others, and they are the majority, propose the Latin alphabet as the source of the runic character. Wimmer believed that the runes developed from the Latin alphabet of the end of the second century A.D. Agrell also contends strongly for a Latin origin, but he finds the counterparts of the runic alphabet in the cursive graffiti of Pompeii, and he considers the first century A.D. as the date of the transformation of the Latin alphabet into the runic script. According to von Friesen, a combination of Latin and Greek alphabets was the source of the runes. "Some individual Goths mercenaries, for instance-from the north-western coast of the Black Sea, in the course of visits to the Roman provinces, learnt Greek and Latin and the Greek and Latin forms of writing used in state edicts and in private life.... Such a Goth, or several such Goths working together, undertook to write out the Gothic language on the basis of the knowledge of Latin and Greek writing thus acquired. The result of these efforts is the runic stave." (O. von Friesen). The invention of the runes influenced
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