TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 185 



source, such names having the proper initial letter and also some suitability to 

 describe its shape ; tlio same as if in En<jlisli we called 

 A — Arch or Arrowhead. B — Bow or Butterfly. C — Curve or Crescent. 



This, however, is contrary to all analogy among- methods of writing of which 

 we know the development; and moreover, several of the names of the Hebrew 

 letters are not actual words in common use in the Hebrew writings, but words 

 which liave become obsolete, and of which, in one or two cases, it is hard to recover 

 the meaning. The letters, moreover, cannot originally have been mere arbitrary 

 signs, or there would have been greater distinctions between some of them, such 

 as it was subsequently found desirable to introduce. 



If, too, the Phceniciau letters came from an extraneous source, we may well ask 

 where it was, and how it happens that no traces of the original names of the 

 letters have been preserved. 



It seems far more probable that the Phoenicians, possibly in the lirst instance 

 borrowing the idea from the Egyptians, struck out for themselves a more purely 

 literal aud therefore a more simple and useful alphabet. A classification of sounds 

 once established, and a system of syllabic symbols once invented, the transition to 

 a pure literal alphabet is comparatively easy, especially when once the syllabic 

 symbols have, from the introduction of foreign words or from other causes, been 

 employed for the initial sound only of the syllables they represent. 



Such a change, involving a departure from old practice, might perhaps more 

 readily take place in an adjacent country to that in which the syllabic system pre- 

 v<ailed than in tlie country itself; and Ave may readily conceive a practical people 

 like the Phojniciaus importing from Egypt a system of pictorial writing thus 

 modified. 



Certainly their alphabet, unlike the letters of the later class of Egyptian hiero- 

 glyphics, does not appear to consist of merely a few survivors from a whole army 

 of symbols. On the contrary, it seems to present some traces of arrangement ; for 

 the objects representing the letters appear to be grouped in pairs, each comprising 

 two objects in some manner associated with each other; and between each pair 

 is inserted a third letter, represented by an object not so inmiediately connected 

 with those preceding it, but still not absolutely alien from them. 



Thus the ox and the house are followed by the camel — an animal, by the way, 

 not represented in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The door and the window are fol- 

 lowed by the peg ; the weapon aud enclosure by the serpent ; the hand and the 

 palm by the ox-goad ; the water and the fish by the support ; the eye and the 

 mouth by the reaping-liook ; the head and the back of the head by the tooth ; and 

 the alphabet concludes with the iiual mark, x . 



It would be superfluous to attempt to point out the bearings of this question of 

 the origin aud development of the Phtcnician alphabet on the history of civiliza-. 

 tion in Europe and Western Asia. 



Future discoveries may possibly bring us nearer the cradle of this alphabet ; but 

 it seems probable that on the Moabite stone we find the letters still retainino- 

 enough of their original pictorial character to justify a belief that they there occur 

 in a comparatively early stage, and not removed by many centuries ft-om the time 

 when tliey were merely delineations of the objects the names of which they have 

 preserved. Assumijig this to have been the case, what is the stage of culture to 

 Avhicli the inventors of this alphabet appear to have attained ? 



They were not mere nomads or hunters, but a people with fixed dwellings for 

 themselves and enclosures for their cattle ; they were acquainted with agriculture, 

 and had domesticated animals, and employed the ox as a beast of draught to cul- 

 tivate fields, the produce of which they reaped with metallic sickles. In feet 

 their civilization would seem to have been at least equal to that of the bronze- 

 using people of the Swiss lake-dwellings. 



A Puta-])atoo from New Zt'cdand. By Sir Duncan Gidh, Bart. 



The author was presented with a stone weapon called pata-patoo bv his friend 

 the late Capt. Lowe, who had been an old traveller among the islands of the 



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