32 JOHN EEADE : 



and was in vogue during- the Semitic conquest of the Delta, M. de Eougé was led 

 to trace the Semitic alphabet to that source. The careful collation of both sets of 

 characters, with special attention to the transliteration of Egyptian words in the 

 Bible, and still more, to the Egyptian transliteration of Syrian geographical names, 

 conducted the inquirer to the welcome conclusion that every Semitic letter could be 

 easily deduced from its hieratic prototype. The documents of which M. de Eougé 

 availed himself in his investigation were not accessible to students of a much earlier 

 date. One of them, the Papyrus Prisse, "the most ancient of all books," was obtained 

 at Thebes by M. Prisse d'Avenues, by whom it was presented to the Bibliothèque Nationale 

 at Paris, and published in fac-simile in 184'7. It purports to be a copy of a work written 

 by Prince Ptah-Hotep, who lived in the reign of Assa, a king of the fifth dynasty. "By 

 the curious irony of chance," writes Mr. Taylor, "this primeval treasure — this stray waif 

 which has thus floated down to us from the days of the very childhood of the world — has 

 for its subject the moralizing of an aged sage, who deplores the deterioration of his age, 

 and laments the good old times which had passed away." ' The Paj/i/rus Prisse furnished the 

 best type of hieratic writing, as adapted to literary and commercial purposes in the early 

 Empire ; and the Semitic characters with which that writing was minutely compared 

 were those of another A'enerable, but much later, monument of the past — the famous 

 Moabite Stone discovered in 1868. The conclusions worked out with such conscientious 

 assiduity by MM. de Rouge, father and son, have the sanction of a number of distin- 

 guished names. But while the hypothesis is sustained by the aiithority of Professors Max 

 Millier, Sayce, Peile and Mahaffy, among British, and Lenormaut, Eutiug, Maspero, Fabretti 

 and Ebers, among foreign, philologists, the objectors are also men of mark, including 

 Professors Robertson Smith, R. Stuart Poole and Lagarde. Their adverse criticism has 

 been firmly and ably answered by Isaac Taylor.- 



Before taking leave of the old world, it may be interesting to show, with as much 

 brevity as is consistent with clearness, the connection between the alphabets of to-day and 

 those whose start in life we have been considering. If the argument of de Rongé be well- 

 founded, and Mr. Taylor's genealogy be correct, all the alphabets in use to-day on the old 

 continent, with the exception of the Chinese and Japanese, which are not alphabets in our 

 sense, are descended from the hieratic, and, through it, from the immemorial hieroglyphics 

 of Egypt. The Semitic bore two children, the Phœnician and the South Semitic. From 

 the latter, through the Joktanite, came the Sabean, the Thamudite (Safa) and the Oirianite 

 (Yemen). The Sabean begat the Himyaritic, which begat the Ethiopie, which again begat 

 the Amharic. The Omanite (if Mr. Taylor's view, already stated, as to the origin of the 

 Indian alphabet be accepted) bore the Old Indian or Asoka, which had three sturdy sons, 

 the Pali, the Nagari and the Dravidian. The Pali became the father of the Burmese, 

 Siamese, JaA'^anese, Siugalese, and Corean ; the Nagari, of the Tibetan, Gujarati, Kashmiri, 

 Marathi, and Bengali ; the DraA'idian, of the Malayan, the Telugu, the Kanarese, the Tamil 

 and the Grantha. The Phœnician bore three children, the Sidonian, the Tyrian, and the 

 Cadmean. The Sidonian bore the Punic and the Aramean. The Punic begat the Iberian 

 and the Numidian. The Aramean had a family of seven : the Herodian, Palmyrene, 

 Estranghelo, Hauranitic, Nabathean, Iranian and Bactrian. The child and grandchild of 



1 The Alphabet, i. 95, 96. '' Ibid., i. 70-147. 



