in the triple Inscriptions of the Persians, &c. 299 
of this writing transcribed into Chaldee, or any other language ; and the names 
are made out to be expressed in letters only through means that are quite inad- 
missible ; as a brief reference to them, a little further on, will, I apprehend, be 
sufficient to show. 
16. Here it may, perhaps, occur to the reader to object, that the Babylonians 
must be allowed to have possessed an alphabet at a very remote period ; since 
there is a tradition of considerable standing, that Ezra thence borrowed the 
square, or Chaldean character, with which the Hebrew text of the Bible is now 
written, and substituted it, on the return of the Jews from Babylon, for that 
previously employed by them, with which they had become less familiar during 
their Chaldean captivity, and which he, in consequence, abandoned to the use of 
the Samaritans. In reply to this objection, I have to state, that the story on 
which it rests, though so long and so generally received, is proved to be utterly 
unfounded by the coins dug out of the ruins of Jerusalem ; as these clearly show 
that the character in question retained very nearly its ancient shape (little dif- 
ferent from that which is at present to be seen in the Samaritan copies of the 
Pentateuch) for, at any rate, more than 400 years after the period at which it 
is, in the above story, represented to have undergone a sudden and complete 
alteration, namely, till the death of Simon Maccabeus, about 130 years before 
the commencement of the Christian era. The oldest legends, of ascertained 
age, to whose elements the modern Hebrew letters exhibit any affinity of shape, 
are the Syriac inscriptions found in Palmyra, one of which is dated as early as 
the 360th year of the Seleucidx, answering nearly to the forty-ninth of our era.* 
Whether the Hebrew character displayed at so early a date the approach to 
squareness which is observable in the cognate writing of those inscriptions, can 
now no longer be determined ; but, at any rate, it must have done so before the 
Christians returned to the study of Hebrew in the third century, when Origen 
was persuaded by his Jewish instructors that the old letters of the sacred text 
were abandoned, and a new set substituted, during the Babylonian captivity ;— 
a fiction which could not have been thought of, till a striking difference of shape 
had begun to appear between the Hebrew and Samaritan elements, and which, 
* See Philosophical Transactions, vol. Ixviii. Part ii. Article 87. In the first volume of the 
second part of my Work, Plate ii., a fac-simile is given of two of the lines of the above mentioned 
inscriptions, as also a brief analysis of their contents in the same volume, pp. 222-220. 
2P2 
