THE EVOLUTION OF THE ALPHABET. 245 



dynasty, or three or four thousand years before the Christian 

 era, the inhabitants of the valley of the Nile had twenty-two 

 different articulations, and used one or more alphabetical signs 

 for each of them. 



The Egyptians did not employ these alphabetical characters 

 to the exclusion of all others. They also preserved some ideo- 

 grams and a considerable number of syllabic signs, of which M. 

 Maspero gives the list in his Histoire Ancienne. Thus, their 

 writing was one of the most learned and most perfect, but also 

 the most complicated, that could be imagined. The Phoenicians 

 charged themselves with the duty of simplifying it, and they 

 kept of the immense quantity of signs only those which corre- 

 sponded with simple articulations, or consonants, and obtained 

 twenty-two characters, which were sufficient to represent all the 

 sounds of a language an,d all their possible combinations. Some 

 Orientalists have looked for the origin of this alphabet in the cu- 

 neiform or Cypriote writing. M. Berger, discussing their theories, 

 holds in the end, with Champollion, M. de Rouge, and M. Maspero, 

 that the twenty-two signs were borrowed from the Egyptian 

 writing, as it also came by natural development from the ancient 

 pictographic writing. Greece adopted these characters, but not 

 without adapting them to its limpid and sonorous language, 

 which could not be satisfied with a writing exclusively composed 

 of consonants ; and, after having retouched them, it added a few 

 signs expressive of the vowels. It gratefully acknowledged its 

 indebtedness to the Phoenicians. It boasted of many things, but 

 never boasted of having invented the alphabet. It called the 

 primitive letters whence its classic writing was evolved, Phoeni- 

 cian or Cadmean characters, and showed its appreciation of Cad- 

 mus by making him a son-in-law of Jupiter. The Phoenician 

 alphabet spread gradually through Asia as well as Europe, sup- 

 planting everywhere the cuneiform and hieroglyphic characters. 

 Only China was the exception to this rule, and shut its doors 

 against the alphabet. It has been discovered that even India, so 

 proud of its chimerical antiquity, was indebted to the Phoenicians ; 

 and that the Sanskrit alphabet was not indigenous, but is derived, 

 if not directly from the Phoenician, from one of its derivative al- 

 phabets, the Aramaic alphabet. " Nothing," says M. Berger, " is 

 so imposing as this march of the alphabet to the conquest of the 

 world. There is in it something of the irresistible and fatal char- 

 acter of the great invasions. In the face of the migrations of 

 peoples which periodically precipitated the East upon the West, 

 the Phoenician alphabet went against the current. Having estab- 

 lished itself in the Mediterranean basin, it penetrated to the 

 center of Asia from three sides at once ; while its derivative, the 

 Indian alphabet, occupied gradually the whole country south of 



