IMITATIVE AND SYMBOLICAL. 287 



and Misor. There is coincidence enough in the two accounts to reflect 

 authenticity upon each other : and had there been more, an advantage would 

 eagerly have been taken of the Phoenician narrative, by skeptical polemics, 

 and Moses would have been boldly accused of having stolen his history from 

 this quarter. 



This account of Sanchoniatho, moreover, is not only supported generally 

 by the sacred records, but is distinctly corroborated in regard to the point 

 immediately before us, that of the invention of letters, by the suffrages of 

 Porphyry, Eusebius, Pliny, Quintus Curtius, Lucan, and, indeed, all the Latin 

 writers. And although the Greeks entertained a somewhat different opinion, 

 and ascribed the invention of letters to a younger Taaut, or Hermes, than the 

 son of Misraim, and who flourished about four centuries afterward, and was 

 born in Egypt, as the first Taaut was born in Phoenicia, nothing is more 

 evident than that the Greeks were less acquainted with the history of both 

 Egypt and Phoenicia than the Romans, in consequence of the greater range 

 of the Roman power; and that they confounded two personages of the same 

 name, and who possessed the same crown, and attributed to the one what 

 ought to have been attributed to the other. The oldest Egyptian historian is 

 Manetho, who probably drew up his dynasties about two centuries and a half 

 before the Christian era ; these only touch upon the subject indirectly, but, so 

 far as they go, they rather support than oppose the testimony of Sanchoniatho. 



There is some degree of doubt whether Greece derived its letters from 

 Egypt or from Phoenicia : the best authorities, however, incline to the last 

 opinion ; and suppose them to have been introduced by the Phoenician Pelasgi, 

 upon their settlement in Peloponnesus. The oldest Greek letters are nearly 

 Pelasgic in form ; and, according to the usual fashion in the East, are writ- 

 ten from right to left. This last, however, is by no means a decisive argu- 

 ment ; for upon the earliest use of letters, in most countries, there seems to 

 have been no settled rule : and hence, in, perhaps, all of them, we meet with 

 letters running from right to left, and from left to right ; in many very ancient 

 specimens of Greek running alternately, the one line in one direction, and the 

 ensuing in the other, like the course taken by a plough, whence it was deno- 

 minated, from this machine, the ploughing style; and in both Persia and 

 Egypt, running perpendicularly like the common style of the Chinese, instead 

 of horizontally whether to the right or the left. 



That the Romans derived their alphabet from the Greeks is unquestionable : 

 and hence, admitting the authority of Sanchoniatho, Confirmed as it is by a 

 variety of collateral evidences, the first invention of writing seems to rest 

 with the Phoenicians, and we are able to trace it to within one hundred and 

 sixty years of the flood.* 



I am purposely, however, using the term Phoenician in a very extensive- 

 sense ; in that sense in which it appears to have been used by Herodotus, and 

 the generality of ancient writers, in consequence of Phoenicia being the 

 earliest and most extensive commercial nation; as embracing not merely the 

 maritime coast of Palestine, of which Tyre and Sidon were the chief cities, 

 but the whole country of the Canaanites and the Hebrews, under whatever 

 name it may have passed at different periods, and from different circum- 

 stances ; as Syria, Assyria, Syrophoenicia, Sidonia, Aram ; and, of course, as 

 touching upon, or rather crossing, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and Chaldea. 

 And I hence obtain an answer to those, on the one hand, who contend that 

 alphabetic characters had their origin in Syria ; and to those, on the other, 

 who assert the same in respect to Chaldea, persuading themselves, upon a 

 tradition current among the Jews and Arabians, that Abraham introduced 

 them into Egypt on his migrating from Ur of the Chaldees, at the command 

 of the Almighty, seven generations after the period we have just been con- 

 templating. The fact is, that all these countries spoke the same language, or, 

 at the utmost, dialects of the same language, that in no instance differed far- 

 ther from each other than the Scottish differs from the English ; and all used the 

 same alphabet, or alphabets that possessed as little variation : and hence there 



See Astle, p. 45. 46. 64- 



