xSo 



NATURE 



\_Feb. 19, 1880 



adopted for avoiding it. Why it was never determined to 

 take it out of the way altogether by restricting each 

 character to the expression of a single syllable, was 

 probably due to the same cause as that which makes 

 ourselves cling so tenaciously to our own polyphonous 

 alphabet, the innate conservatism, I mean, of the human 

 mind. At any rate, it was left to a later age and to the 

 foreign borrowers of the Assyrian syllabary to make an 

 improvement which seems to us at once so obvious and so 

 necessary. Up to the last, therefore, an Assyrian cha- 

 racter could not only be used ideographically, but also as 

 the representative of several distinct and different sounds. 

 Take, for instance, the character which, as we have seen, 

 meant originally a corpse. As the usual word in Accadian 

 for "a corpse" was bat, bat remained the usual phonetic 

 value of the character, but besides denoting bat it also 

 denoted the syllables //'/, mit, and be, and might be used 

 to express any one of these sounds whenever the writer 

 willed. 



In the eighth century before our era, the Assyrian mode 

 of writing was adopted by the tribes which at that time 

 occupied Armenia on the north, and Media on the east, 

 and the first great reform was introduced into it by 

 restricting each character to the expression of a single 

 syllable. In order to express syllables, however, a good 

 many characters were required; by the side of ba, for 

 example, it was necessary to have a bi, a be, and a bu, and 

 accordingly, every one who wished to learn to read and 

 write was obliged to have a good memory. It was 

 reserved for the Persians to make the last improvement in 

 the cuneiform system of writing by ingeniously extracting 

 an alphabet out of it. And the way in which they went to 

 work was this. A certain number of characters was 

 taken, their signification as ideographs translated into 

 Persian, and the particular sound with which each of these 

 Persian words began was assigned to the character as its 

 alphabetic value. 



What it required the combined labours of several 

 different races and nations to effect in the case of the 

 cuneiform characters of Assyria and Babylonia was 

 effected unaided and alone by the wonderful people of 

 ancient Egypt. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford con- 

 tains one of the oldest monuments of civilisation in the 

 world, if indeed it is not the very oldest. This is the 

 lintel-stone of a tomb which formed the last resting-place 

 of an official who lived in the time of King Sent, of the 

 second dynasty, whose date is placed by M. Mariette 

 more than 6,000 years ago. The stone is covered with 

 that delicate and finished sculpture which distinguished 

 the earliest period of Egyptian history, and was immeasur- 

 ably superior to the stiff and conventional art of the later 

 ages of Egypt which we are accustomed to see in our 

 European museums. But it is also covered with some- 

 thing more precious still than sculpture, with hieroglyphics 

 which show that even at that remote epoch Egyptian 

 writing was a complete and finished art, with long ages of 

 previous development lying behind it. The hieroglyphic 

 characters are already used not only pictorially and ideo- 

 graphically, but also to express syllables and alphabetic 

 letters, the name of the king, for instance, being spelled 

 alphabetically. In the hands of the Egyptian scribes, 

 however, Egyptian writing never made any further pro- 

 gress. With the fall of what is called the Old Empire 

 (about B.C. 3500) the freshness and expansive force of the 

 people passed away. Egyptian life and thought became 

 fossilised, and through the long series of centuries that 

 followed, Egypt resembled one of its own mummies, 

 faithfully preserving the form and features of a past age 

 and of a life which had ceased to beat in its veins. Until 

 the introduction of Christianity the only change under- 

 gone by Egyptian writing was the invention of a running- 

 hand, which in its earlier and simpler form is called 

 hieratic, and in its later form demotic. 

 But what the Egyptians themselves failed to do was 



done by a body of enterprising and inquisitive strangers. 

 For some centuries after the fall of the Old Empire 

 Egypt was given over to decay and intestine troubles, 

 and when it again emerges into the light of history it is 

 under the princes of hundred-gated Thebes in the period 

 known as that of the Middle Empire. It was while these 

 princes were adorning Thebes with temples and granite 

 colossi, and excavating tombs for themselves in the rocks 

 of Beni-Hassan, that a small party of immigrants, only 

 thirty-seven in all, arrived in the Delta about 2,700 years 

 before the Christian era. They were shepherds and 

 cowherds from the coast of Phoenicia or Palestine, and 

 as it were with an instinctive realisation of the great part 

 their kinsfolk were afterwards to play in the history of 

 Egypt, their arrival was commemorated in painting and 

 hieroglyphics on the walls of one of the tombs at Beni- 

 Hassan. There we may still see them pourtrayed in 

 vermilion and ochre, and trace in their hooked noses and 

 black hair the features of the shepherd-kings who subse- 

 quently held Northern Egypt under their sway for 600 

 years, as well as of the Children of Israel and the later 

 population of the Delta. For a time came when the 

 Egyptians were driven out of the rich and fertile lands of 

 the Delta, the first seat of their power and civilisation, 

 and their places taken by the traders of Tyre and Sidon 

 and the agricultural tribes of Southern Canaan. Hence- 

 forward the Delta received a new name among the sub- 

 jects of the Pharaohs ; it was called Caphtor or " Greater 

 Phoenicia," since here the Phoenician Semites found a 

 richer territory and broader lands in which to expand 

 than in their own narrow coast-line at home. 



It is to these Phoenician settlers that we owe our present 

 alphabet. They were, as I have said, an enterprising 

 people, and their commercial business soon taught them 

 the value of the writing of which their Egyptian neighbours 

 were possessed. But as became men of business they 

 were a practical people as well as an enterprising one ; 

 they felt none of that conservative reverence for the past 

 which prevented change and innovation among the 

 Egyptians, and so when they went to school in Egyptian 

 learning they carried back with them not the whole 

 cumbrous hieroglyphic system with its ideographs, its 

 syllabic values, and its polyphony, but its alphabet only. 

 All else was discarded; they found twenty-two characters 

 sufficient to express all their thoughts and speech, and 

 twenty-two characters only they accordingly kept. These 

 twenty-two characters constitute the so-called Phoenician 

 alphabet, which was handed on by the Phoenicians on the 

 one side to the Hebrews, and on the other side to the 

 Greeks, from whom it has descended through the Romans 

 to ourselves. The Egyptian characters were borrowed 

 by the Phoenicians of the Delta, not in their hieroglyphic 

 but in their hieratic forms, as two or three examples will 

 make self-evident. 



{To be continued) 



RECENT PROGRESS IN ANTHROPOLOGY 



AT the annual meeting of the Anthropological Institute 

 on January 27, the president, Dr. E. B. Tylor, 

 delivered the anniversary address. He compared the 

 present state of the science with that of a generation ago, 

 as shown in the addresses of 1847-8 delivered by Dr. 

 Prichard to the newly-formed Ethnological Society. In 

 those days it was still commonly believed that the broad- 

 skulled tribes, whose remains ate found in our early stone- 

 age burial-mounds, were of the Keltic race ; in fact, the so- 

 called Ancient Britons. How backward comparative philo- 

 logy then was is shown by the fact that so eminent a scholar 

 as Colebrooke fancied that Tamil and other Dravidian 

 languages of South India were mere degraded dialects ot 

 Sanskrit. Prichard was the founder of English anthro- 

 pology, but between his time and ours he two events 

 which have transformed it, namely, the development- 



