Palæography. Bernard Quaritch

Palæography

Palæography - Bernard Quaritch

Скачать книгу
been carried westward as far back at least as the seventh or eighth century B.C. It was virtually the one alphabet, applied by various races to their various languages, which was used at Carthage and Cadiz, at Marseilles and in Sicily and Italy, in the seventh century B.C. Italy was occupied by several distinct sets of people. The Umbrians, Latins, and Oscans occupied all the middle of the peninsula; the Pelasgic tribes who were in the heel and toe of the geographical boot were nearly Grecised; the Etruscans held Tuscany, and Celts occupied Lombardy. Mommsen thought that the Greek alphabet had reached the Italians more than 1300 years before Christ; but a more modest estimate will be safer. It was probably about seven hundred years B.C. when the Etrurians received their alphabet from the Greeks; and there is no reason for thinking, as Mommsen implies, that their first contact with Greek letters had been elsewhere than in Italy. The alphabet reached them no doubt from Cumæ, as it did the Latins, and there was sufficient variation in the practice of the Greek colonies in Italy to account for the differences which mark Etruscan, Umbrian, and Latin writing.

       Table of Contents

      The usual date of the founding of Rome is undoubtedly correct or nearly so. It was about the middle of the eighth century B.C., and the rapid enlargement of the new Latin town on the Tiber, produced by the influx of settlers into a trade emporium with waterway, must have led to an early use of writing. This indicates something like 700 B.C. for the period of the extension of that art over the whole of Italy. The custom of writing from right to left and left to right in alternate lines was retained for several centuries among the various Italic peoples, but the Latins seem to have been the first to adopt the Greek modification by which the letters took their permanent shape from the left-right sequence. In several Greek towns, the old Γ was replaced by a C (the result of a cursive mode of writing), and the triangular Δ had its second and third lines represented by a single curve. The Π was still a

, and the P had a little stroke added to it (
) for the sake of distinction. The Sigma was commonly written
instead of
(Σ). The Latins omitted of course such letters as they found superfluous (z, th, k, ph, ch, ps, and oo), but were naturally bound to retain letters already becoming superfluous to the Greeks (F, Q). The third letter of the alphabet was used for both K and G; but later, when the need of some differentiation became felt, the useless Z was replaced by a second C to which a tail was added (
). The Eta (or Heta) was made to retain its earliest function as a strong breathing (H), although the Greeks were treating it as no more than EE. The Greek confusion between the symbols for ks, ps, and ch, affected the Latins so far that one of the three letters, i.e. X, was taken to represent the only sound of the three which their language needed, namely ks; and this being an afterthought, it was put at the end of the alphabet. Thus in the second century B.C. the Romans had their alphabet completely formed in the capital shapes, and with the phonetic values, which it thenceforward retained. The letters were A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, the F being sounded probably as our V and F, the V as our U and W. It was long afterwards that the F was restricted to the sound of English F, and V as a consonant took the sound of English V (instead of W.) The Q was a more guttural letter than the C originally, but afterwards lost its distinctiveness of utterance. When it became fashionable to learn and quote Greek, in the time of Cicero and after, the letters Κ, Υ, and Ζ were reinserted in the Latin alphabet for form's sake, as K, Y, Z. It was not till the sixteenth century that, in the northern countries of Europe, the letter J was evolved from the black letter form of I (
) and the letter V split into U and V. As for the W, it was needed only by Germanic people, and was consequently a late intruder into the modern Roman alphabet.

       Table of Contents

      To return to the East, the first examples of native Indian writing appeared in the rock-inscribed decrees of Asoka, found in various places over the north of India, from the Indus to the Ganges, and even in the Dekkan; which can be dated between 250 and 230 B.C. The language is Prakrit or Pali, the characters (although at first sight they seem an independent script) were derived like so many others from the Semitic system, and the nearest of the parallel types is the alphabet of the Himyarite inscriptions. The Sabæan monarchy which ruled over Southern Arabia a thousand years B.C. had had large commercial relations with India, and it was probably from that source that the people of Bombay and the North-West acquired the art of writing, how long before Asoka it would be difficult to learn. Out of the simple forms of Asoka's alphabet all the modern scripts of Indian native writing descended, including the artificial and elaborate Nagari alphabet which is one of the latest of them.

       Table of Contents

      In the kingdom of Bactria, the coins of the kings who from about 150 B.C. followed the older Greek princes, bear inscriptions in Indian Prakrit, but not written in the same character as was used by Asoka. The two scripts differ so much in appearance not only from all others, but also between themselves, that one does not easily recognise the fact that they both must have been of Himyaritic origin. They are very different from the Pehlvi which was used by Parthian sovereigns in the second century after Christ, and by the Sassanide kings in the fourth. The Pehlvi had been evolved from the later Aramean, and must have been in use in Persia before the time of Alexander; but the existing specimens are all subsequent to the beginning of the Christian era. And as for the script which is called Zend, and which is used for writing the Zoroastrian books of the most ancient Persian language, there is nothing to prove that it is not of much later invention than the Pehlvi.

       Table of Contents

      Samaria.—The writing of Palestine was probably identical originally with that of the Phœnicians, and the Samaritan script, which is still in use for biblical purposes, has retained to the present day a considerable resemblance with that of Tyre and Sidon. The expatriation and partial repatriation of the Jews and Israelites during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., had the effect of leaving only a small remnant in the north of the land who preserved their ancient writing. From that time to this some of the descendants of the Samarians have continued to write their Pentateuch (which for them is the whole of the Bible) in the ancient characters of the Hebrew language (a specimen is found on plate 4). All the rest of the Jews, in whatever part of the world they may have been, have retained the square character (with its various Rabbinical modifications) which they learned in Chaldæa in the seventh century B.C. But the Hebrew language never returned to the Holy Land. Hebrew, as spoken among the Samaritans, underwent the same Aramaisation as the language of the Judæans, and from three or four centuries B.C. down to the eighth century of our era, the language of all Syria was Syriac with local dialects, and Greek in the great cities. The usual character in which Syriac was written has already been mentioned, but the Samaritans wrote even their semi-Syriac speech in the old characters of their Bible; and there is a really Samaritan Pentateuch—different from the Hebrew Pentateuch in Samaritan letters—which

Скачать книгу