1885.] NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 81 



Dr. Charles E. Moldenke road a paper on 



THE EGYPTIAN ORIGIN OF OUR ALPHABET. 



Many strange and false notions have been entertained about 

 the origin of our modern arts and sciences; and these notions 

 have become stereoty|)ed in our educational books, and are dis- 

 seminated among all classes of society. It was the work of 

 Egyptology to revolutionize many of our conceptions, and to 

 destroy some of the pet ideas of modern times. Too little 

 attention had been given to the many passages of ancient 

 authors, paying their tribute to Egyi)t as the source of all learn- 

 ing; or if noted, they could not be established, for want of proof. 

 That period of guess-work and arbitrary judgment has happily 

 passed away, and a new era has begun since the discovery of the 

 key to the Egyptian language by Champollion, and its develop- 

 ment by Lepsius. We now know that we do not owe our mathe- 

 matics and our decimal system to Greek or Chaldee sages; that 

 our science of medicine does not take its beginning with Hippo- 

 crates or Galen, but with old Egyptian doctors, pre-eminently with 

 Nebsecht, the great physician at the time of Moses at the court of 

 KamseslI, ; that the first principles of architecture have come 

 down to us from Egypt by way of Athens and Home; that 

 the art of war does not date back only to an Alexander or Julius 

 Caesar, but to a Thothmes III. and Kamses II.; that the inven- 

 tion of glass is not due to the Phoenicians, but to the experiments 

 of the Egyptians; and that most of our so-called comforts of 

 life have their starting-point in Egypt, and have only undergone 

 development and improvement in the long journey of thousands 

 of years till our day. All this should make us heartily grateful to 

 the inhabitants of the Nile valley; but we should also bless them 

 for the greatest gift they have bequeathed to us, for one that 

 cannot be outweighed by all the others — the gift of written 

 language. This greatest of blessings — the means of exhibiting 

 the spoken word to the eye, the means of recording our ideas 

 for posterity — we owe to the ancestors of a people now despised, 

 to the forefathers of the wretched Copts and Fellaheen of Egypt. 



We can trace our alphabet, as we still use it every day of our 

 lives, to its very first origin; and can lead it to a point where there 

 is but one further step possible: to spoken language. Our 

 encyclopedias contain so many false and absurd statements with 

 regard to the origin of the alphabet, mingling truth and fiction, 

 that in this they are, for the most part, untrustworthy authori- 

 ties. The alphabet is generally put down as a Phoenician inven- 

 tion, which is alsolutehj wrong. To this Shemitic people the 

 invention of many things has been ascribed, without any satis- 



