ORIENTAL SCHOLARSHIP DURINC THE PRESENT CENTURY. 691 



of tlie same bridge that led from Plieuicia to Greece have been hiid 

 bare, and they lead clearly from Plienicia back to Egypt. It is well 

 known that even the ancients hardly ever doubted that the alphabet 

 was originally discovered in Egypt and carried from thence by the 

 Phenicians to Greece and Italy. Plato, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, 

 and Gellius, all speak of Egypt as the cradle of the alplmbet, and Taci- 

 tus [A nnals, xi. 14), who seems to have taken a special interest in this sub- 

 ject, is most explicit on that point. It was supposed for a time that the 

 Egyptians simply took certain hieroglyphic signs, and made them stand 

 for their initial letters. This AVas called the akrological theoi^y, but it 

 is no longer tenable. The alphabet was never a discovery, in the usual 

 sense of the word; it was like all the greatest discoveries, a natural 

 growth. It arose, without any intentional effort, ft'om the employment 

 of what are called complimentary hieroglyphics.* - - - 



What the Vicomte de Rouge did, was to select the most ancient 

 forms of the Phenician alphabet, as they are found on the sarcophagus 

 of Eshmunezar (or better still, on the Stone of Mesha, wiiich was not 

 known in his time), and to show how near they came, not indeed to the 

 most ancient hieroglyphics, but to certain hieratic cursive signs which 

 have the same phonetic values as their corresponding Phenician letters. 

 This was a most brilliant discovery, and I still possess a very scarce 

 paper which he sent me in 1859. He never published a full account of 

 his discovery himself, but after his death his notes were published by 

 his son in 1874. 



I know" quite well that some scholars have remained skeptical as to 

 the Egyptian origin of the Phenician letters. My friend Lepsius Avas 

 never quite convinced. Attempts have been made to derive the Pheiii 

 cian letters from a cuneiform source or from the Cypriote letters, but 

 the result has hitherto been far from satisfactory. The Phenician let- 

 ters must have had ideographic antecedents. Where are we to look 

 for them, if not in Egypt? What has always made me feel convinced 

 that Kouge was right is the fact that we have to deal with a series, 

 and that 15 out of the 23 letters of this series are almost identical 

 in Phenician and in Egyptian. We are perfectly justified, there- 

 fore, in making a certain allowance for some modifications in the 

 rest. These modifications are certainly not greater than the modifica- 

 tions which the Phenician letters underwent later in their travels over 

 the whole civilized world. But there is another argument in Rouge's 

 fa vol- which has often been ignored, namely, the fact that the Egyptians, 

 whenever they liad to transcribe foreign words, have fixed in many cases 

 on tbe identical letters which served as the prototypes of the Phenician 

 alphabet. This fact, first pointed out by Dr. Hincks, is one of the many 

 valuable services which that ingenious scholar has rendered to hiero- 

 glyphic studies; and the Yicomte de Rouge has been the first to 

 acknowledge how much his own discovery owes to the labors of Dr. 



* Hincks, Egyptian Alphabet, p. 7 . 



