Palæography. Bernard Quaritch
before it, down to sixty years ago, the languages and monuments of Egypt and Chaldæa had never been looked upon by the eye of intelligence. The mystery of ages is a mystery no more.
Writing in Chaldæa, 4000 B.C.
The age of Chaldæan writing (engraving) is not far behind that of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. It is said that an inscription of the first Sargon, King of Akkad (in the square or angular character out of which the wedge-shaped or cuneiform letters were evolved), carries the record back to 3800 B.C. Even if we take a large latitude in discounting the chronology, there still remains a certainty that the cuneiform character of Babylonia was used over the greater part of Western Asia from at least 2500 B.C., and in Persia and its tributaries down to 300 B.C. While, of the Egyptian writing, we have remains exhibiting all the stages of development, namely (1) the hieroglyphic, (2) the hieratic, (3) the demotic, (4) the Coptic in Greek letters; of the cuneiform script we have only the two phases which may be roughly said to correspond to the Egyptian hieratic and demotic, or more exactly to two stages of the hieratic. We cannot reconstruct the original Chaldæan hieroglyphics which must have preceded the Chaldæan hieratic and cuneiform; nor do we know (at present) of any truly cursive hand developed from the wedge-letters. Among the relics of the Assyrians is a great number of stone tablets of small size, containing reports to the monarch from provincial governors. One of them, now in the British Museum, is supposed, from a phrase which occurs in it, to show that the stone tablets were simply copies made for preservation in the archives, while the actually transmitted originals were written on papyrus. If that were the practice, and there is inherent probability in the suggestion, there would assuredly have been a great quantity of papyrus used throughout the Assyrian empire; yet not a fragment of that material has been discovered. In the absence of some positive evidence, we can but suppose it likely that the Assyrians used papyrus (or skins) for writing on, as well as the Egyptians, but applied it only to temporary purposes, trusting rather to granite and brick, than to paper or to leather, whatever was intended for enduring record.
Progress of the Art, B.C. 2500–1500
At about 2500 B.C. all the civilisation of the world was confined to the regions bordering the whole length of the Red Sea, and extending northwards to Armenia. In the South was Egypt, a powerful monarchy dominant at times from Ethiopia to Asia Minor, and in the North the Chaldee kingdom of Akkad dominant over Mesopotamia and the frontier lands. The country of Egypt was named by its people Keme or Kheme, and their language was called the speech of Keme (out of which the Hebrews made Ham). The name of Ai-Gupt was given to the Delta by its Semitic neighbours and inhabitants, while they called the whole country Mizr (Mizraim) or Misr. The former name has prevailed in European use, as well as furnished the words Copt and Coptic, although this is questionable. The Kheme language was written both in hieroglyphic and in hieratic characters at the year 2500 B.C. The former were the ancient picture-symbols, which were arranged in vertical columns and read from top to bottom and from left to right. This practice was retained to the end, notwithstanding that the Egyptians had been long in contemporaneous possession of the cursive hieratic characters, written in horizontal lines from right to left, just as Hebrew and Arabic. The hieratic character was simply an abridgment of the hieroglyphic, a reduction of the pictorial to conventional forms.
The two scripts endured side by side till Christianity supervened, and then the modified Greek alphabet which we call the Coptic came into existence. The demotic script, a still more cursive reduction of the hieratic, had come into use probably a thousand years B.C., but it was only used for private mercantile transactions, and it died out on the establishment of the Coptic. Examples of both hieroglyphic and demotic writing are given in the plates accompanying this sketch.
The Akkadian Chaldee language (to be distinguished from the later Semitic Syro-Chaldee) has, like the Egyptian Khemi, no immediate affinities with any other important form of speech. They are both of an older type and stock than the oldest known members of the Aryan and Semitic families. The Akkadian is called Turanian, as showing undoubted resemblances to the Turki and Mongol languages of the lands lying north and east of Persia, which were named by the Persians Turan, as distinguished from Iran. The place of the Khemi in philology is not so easily defined. It does not seem that any other language than that of Egypt was ever written in the Egyptian script. The case is somewhat different with the Chaldee characters. They were adopted in varying modes for writing Semitic and Aryan languages, as well as the native Akkadian. This resulted from the blending of populations by successive conquests. The Akkadian-Chaldees ruled in Mesopotamia till 1500 B.C., when they went down before the Semites from Northern Arabia. A branch of these Semites had already for a considerable time occupied the eastern side of Mesopotamia and were in possession of the region round Nineveh, at the time when their Arabian kindred swept away the old dynasty that had had its chief seat in Babylonia.
At or about 1300 B.C., the Ninevite Assyrians or Syro-Chaldæans united the whole of Mesopotamia by conquest, and completed the downfall of the Akkadian Chaldæans who were thenceforward reduced to servitude. Even the later uprisings in Babylonia were only the work of princes of Assyrian blood. The date mentioned is another standpoint in the history of writing. The Semite Assyrians were now the chief users of the cuneiform script. At Babylon they seem to have retained it in the same form into which it had developed in the hands of the Akkad people. At Nineveh, it had undergone a modification; the combinations of the symbols being considerably altered, so that one may speak of Babylonian characters and of Assyrian characters as being two scripts, although they look identical.
The Semitic Alphabet about 1700 B.C.
This is (in chronological sequence) the place at which mention should be made of the Greek myth that alphabetical letters were introduced into Bœotia by Cadmus the Phœnician. It has always been accepted as substantially true, even by those who knew that Cadmus in Semitic speech meant simply The Ancient, or The Eastern; and has usually been assigned to about 1500 B.C. The story requires some modification, and the date is probably a good deal out of reckoning. Here it is only referred to as showing the early use of letters by the Phœnicians. There are really no extant monuments to prove the anteriority of the Semite alphabet to that of the Greeks, but there can be no question as to the fact. The names of the Greek letters are manifestly borrowed from a Semitic speech, and the Cadmus story is in itself a sufficient acknowledgment of the secondary position of the Hellenes. It is generally held that the Phœnicians derived their alphabet by means of a selection from the phonetic symbols of the Egyptian hieratic script. Whether the process was due to the Phœnicians themselves, is not so clearly asserted. Mr. Maunde Thompson, following Lenormant and the Vicomte de Rougé, seems to consider that it gradually took place in Egypt after the Arabs had conquered the country, and when the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings had established their dynasty (2000 B.C.). During the five hundred years of their rule there must have been a large Semitic immigration, and it is not unlikely that the Semitic alphabet was then derived from the Egyptian for the use of the Syrians and Arabs who dwelt in Lower Egypt. There is, on the other hand, a modern theory that the Semitic alphabet was not evolved in this way, but from the hieratic Babylonian writing. It is true that similarities may be found between them, and it is also demonstrable that the Greek names of the alphabet were drawn from the speech, not of Phœnicia or Palestine, but of Aram or Semitic Chaldæa. Nothing is certain as to the origin of the Semitic alphabet, notwithstanding the elaborate comparative tables produced by Rougé and others, beyond the fact that several letters resemble Egyptian (and Chaldæo-Assyrian) symbols having sometimes the same phonetic value. The names given to their characters by the Semites are undoubtedly descriptive of their apparent iconism, and the initial sound of each name is the power of the letter. This, on the face of it, would imply that the Aramaic alphabet was an original invention. The Greeks who first received it, must have been those of Asia Minor, not those of Hellas; and the first transmitters were neither Arabs, nor Jews, nor Phœnicians, but Babylonian Aramæans in contact with Cilicia and Cappadocia. The names of the letters, as sounded by the Syrians of Palestine