78 On the Affinity of the Hiberno- Celtic and Phenician Languages. 
inscription on a monument earlier than the time of Cadmus. The learned editor 
of the last edition of Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary meets this with a 
very conclusive answer. ‘How came,” says he, ‘the alphabet used by the 
Greek nation to bear so close a resemblance in the names, order, and very form of 
the letters, to the alphabets of the nations which belonged to the Shemetic race ; 
namely, to those of the Phenicians, Samaritans, and Jews; or, to speak more cor- 
rectly, to that of the Phenicians, for those and the Jews, until the time of Cyrus, 
used the same characters? One of two suppositions must be the answer to this ques- 
tion. Either the Phenicians introduced an alphabet into Greece so far superior to the 
old Pelasgic as to be adopted in its stead, or the alphabet of Cadmus and that of the 
Pelasgi were the same. 
“* The first supposition will be found extremely difficult to support. It takes for 
granted what few, if any, will be willing to allow, that there existed in those early 
ages a sufficient degree of mental activity and refinement, on the part of the rude 
inhabitants of Greece, to induce them to discriminate between the comparative ad- 
vantages of two rival systems of alphabetic writing.” The most rational conclusion 
is, that the Pelasgic and Cadmean alphabets were the same, and both were Phe- 
nician. 
The history of Greece, previous to the period when Cadmus taught them the use 
of an alphabet, is nearly a blank, and involved in dark fable for near 800 years after. 
Rome was founded about the year 704, A.C. But both these periods are, however, 
recent when compared with the glorious era of Tyre and Sidon ; and it will not be 
denied that the Greeks, when first visited by the Pelasgi, were nearly as ignorant 
and illiterate barbarians as the South-Sea islanders were, on their first discovery, to the 
English. 
Their learning, science, arts, and the whole of their mythology, with its ap- 
pendages, were all borrowed from their schoolmasters. They really have nothing 
antient of their own. It must have appeared to every scholar how absurd, far- 
fetched, and puerile, are most of the attempts made to derive Greek names from their 
own language. 
The Greek mythology seems to have been a disfigured and corrupted paraphrase 
of the Phenician system: each mythos appears a confused representation of some- 
thing they had learned without being acquainted with its precise or defined meaning ; 
and every story being involved in a mist, is exaggerated and distorted by being viewed 
through it. 
Most of the names of their divinities and heroes have no meaning in the Greek 
language, but appear mere barbarous and unmeaning epithets. This is equally true 
with the Romans, who, indeed, invented some new divinities, and gave them names 
indicating their supposed attributes, but the names of their old deities are equally 
without meaning in the Latin. 
