ORIENTAL ELEMENTS OF CULTURE IN THE OCCIDENT. 515 



of the ulpluiliet into l*al('stiiu> with tho Philistines from C^rete. " Ah 

 regards the insci'iptioiisj (liscoyered l)y P^vaiis'' in Crete, even if, as 

 asserted, they contained -tHe mother seript of the C'anaanitish al[)ha1)et, 

 and the elay ta1)h^t ai'ehives of Cnossus, from which the decipherment 

 will prol)al»ly have to start as soon as they ai'c com})U^tely })al)lished, 

 went hack Ix'vond the fourteenth century B. C,'' still we have in the 

 Orient much older systems of writing, besides it is far from settled 

 that the ([uestion is here of a purely letter alphabet. The Aery num- 

 ber !t8 of the })ictoiira[)hs discussed ])y Evans is against this assump- 

 tion. II. Kluge,"'who reads them as Greek clraracters, had to employ 

 arbitrary identifications of different signs in order to reduce their 

 niuiiber. Of the many improbabilities of this attempt at decipher- 

 ment may be mentioned tho assumption that the original vowels 

 became Semitic lai'ynga! signs, while the opposite de\('lo[)ment appears 

 as the only natural one. Furthermore, according to the original 

 forms assumed by him for the Cretan lineal signs, they should have 

 something" in conunon with the later Greek writing in contrast to the 

 Canaanitish, but on the contrary the dependence of the (ireek forms 

 on the Canaanitish has been proven with great acumen by Lidzbarski. 

 The testimony of the ancients themselves that the letters of Cadnuis 

 went back to an Oriental hero would have little weight if it had not a 

 strong support in the unmistakably Semitic names of the Greek 

 characters. 



In the Middle Ages another scarcelv less grand achievement of the 

 human mind w^as transmitted by the Saracenes to the Occident — the 

 Arabic system of numerals. To estimate the importance of reducing 

 to a consistent system the position value of the signs which rest on the 

 invention of the Zero, we must recall the utter impossibility of calcu- 

 lating a logarithmic table with Greek or Roman numerals, and the 

 absolute necessity of this auxiliary for all modern mathematical 

 sciences. Even the simplest arithmetical operations, as dixision, could 

 not possibly be carried on with the antique mmierals, and it rec[uires, 

 indeed, a kind of fanaticism to prefer, even at present, on title pages 

 such modes of writing as CIOIOCCCLXXXVIII, etc., instead of 1888. 



The form of the Ara])ic ciphers exhibit in many directions remark- 

 able relations. There was, of course, many attempts to refer them to 

 an Occidental origin, but these attempts are to ]>e taken still less seri- 

 ously than those concerning letter script. The graphic e\olution of 

 the Arabic numerals from the Roman, defended with much skill by 



« A. Fries, Die neuesten Forschungen iiber den Ursprung des seniitischen Alpha- 

 bets, Zeitsciirift des Deutschen Paliistiiia Verciiis, xxii, 1S!)1>, 11S-12(). 



''Arthur J. Evans, Primitive Pictotrrapiis and a jirc-PlKonician seript from Crete 

 aaid the Peloponnese: The .lournal of ilcllenic Studies, xiv, London, 1894, pp. 270- 

 372; Further Discoveries of Cretan and yEgeaii Script, ibid., xvii, LSr)7, ])p. 327-395. 



fAthenfeum, May 19, 1900, p. 634. 



''Die Schrift del- Mykenier, C()then, 1897. 



