Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 49:195 (Jul 1892)
Article: On The Early History Of Our Alphabet
Author: Charles William Super

BSac 49:195 (July 1892) p. 496

On The Early History Of Our Alphabet

President Charles W. Super

Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East, London, 1883.
Rawlinson and Gilman, History of Ancient Egypt, New York, 1887.
Roberts, Introduction to Greek Epigraphy, London, 1887.
Taylor, The Alphabet, 2 vols., London, 1883.
Kirchhoff, Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets, Berlin, 1877.
Clermont-Ganneau, Un chapitre de l’histoire de l’A B C In Melanges Graux, Paris, 1884.
Wuttke, Entstehung der Schrift, Leipzig, 1872.
Faulmann, Illustrirte Geschichte der Schrift, Wien, 1880.
Hinrichs, Griechische Epigraphik, Nordlingen, 1885.
Fabretti, Palaeographische Studien, Leipzig, 1877.
Melzer, Geschichte der Carthager, Berlin, 1879.
McClintock and Strong, Encyclopaedia.

The object of this essay is to place before those who may chance to read it a succinct statement of the known facts relating to the rise and development of our alphabet. We are not yet quite in position to write a history of the most important of all civilizing arts; but, to judge from current indications, we are not far from the time when a history of writing will be easily possible. Busy hands directed by trained intellects are at work in nearly all the lands that border on the Mediterranean, the Euphrates, the Tigris, bringing to light the records on which such a history must be based; and it is probable that before the end of the present century so much epigraphic material will have been accumulated and lucidly arranged that we shall be as well in-

BSac 49:195 (July 1892) p. 497

formed upon this as upon any other important subject pertaining to antiquity. None surely surpasses it in interest.

To us children of the nineteenth century no progress seems possible without written records. Pen and pencil are in such constant requisition as to be well-nigh indispensable to any vocation. What we shall do to-morrow depends in no small measure upon the recorded transactions of to-day; and we trust the unaided memory to a very limited extent to tell us what transpired last year or even last week. The spelling-book is the foundation-stone of our civilization and it, to continue the figure, rests upon the alphabet. Yet there are extensive literatures not founded on an alphabet. Wuttke devotes a volume of eight hundred octavo pages to the study of those systems of writing that are without an alphabet. And the contest that raged so fiercely among classical scholars, for more than half a century, over the question whether the art of writing was known in the time of Homer, abundantly proves that, in the opinion of many men of intelligence, the highest achievements in the poetic art are possible without the aid of writing, and conditioned wholly upo...