THE FIRST ALPHABET

Hokitika Guardian, 21 March 1927, Page 1

THE FIRST ALPHABET

THEORY OF ITS INVENTION. (By Science Service.) Picture a Semitic thinker in old Egypt poring over a tablet of Egyptian picture writing. Ho knows somctliing about the Egyptian hieroglyphics, how the sign for house, for example, is a box-like drawing, vaguely suggestive of a child’s picture of a bouse. Probably be knows bow to write Ids name in the Egyptian, piecing it together in a series of simple signs to make up the sounds. And lie has an idea.

From one inscription or a single series of inscriptions, the Semite, with a littlo help, perhaps from an Egyptian friend, picks out some 22 signs that represent different consonant sounds in words. With these few signs, lie believes, a kind of writing can be done that will be easier to sjiell out than the picture pusvdes of the Egyptian. The signs lie has chosen as letters are set down in the order of their appearance on the Egpytian inscription. And so the first crude alphabet is devised and ready for changes and improvements by other thinkers of many countries.

This theory as to how the alphabet was invented, and how the letters were set down in order, lias been advanced by Hr B. L. Tillman, of the University of Chicago. Hr Ullman. who presented his theory at a meeting of archaeologists at Cambridge, believes that the alphabet may he of greater antiquity than most scholars have considered likely.

The oldest specimens of writing believed to he in alphabet form are the crude Semitic inscriptions found at Sinai in 1905. These inscriptions, Ur Ullman said, have been generally dated as late as 1500 8.C.. and that date has been widely used in recent venrs as the time of invention of alphabetic writing. But three years ago. inscriptions in Phoenician alphabetic writing almost as old as the Sinai writing were found in Byblos, in Syria. The letters of these inscriptions were considerably less crude than the Sinai writing, and Dr Ullman point's out that such progress in use of the alphabet as these Phoenician inscriptions show could not

have taken place in one or two centuries. The Sinai writings, he says, . are probably quite as old as the most daring speculators have suggested. .From this he is “inclined to set the origin of the alphabet at about 2000 8.C., namely about the nineteenth century 8.C., or earlier—fully 1000 years earlier than was commonly believed a few years ago.” According to Dr Ullman’s conclusions the Greeks must have got their alphabet from the Phoenicians much earlier than the ninth or tenth century 8.C., which is the time generally accepted by scientists. “ The old Greek tradition,” he said, “was that the alphabet was introduced hv Cadmus, in 1313 B.C. My view is that this may be right, and in any case the twelfth century is ' the latest possible date for the epoch-making event.” The Greek traditional date is upheld hv this philologist on the grounds that Greek letters are shaped more like earlier letter forms than like- alphabet letters of the Ninth Century B.C. The Greek name for papyrus indicates that this material was imported into Greece for writing purposes in the twelfth century, and this also implies that the Greeks had an alphabet then. Hr Ullman finds.

“Thus.” he concludes, “the Greek alphabet may have existed at the time of the Trojan War. _and must have existed when the Homeric poems were composed.”