162 THE BIRTHPLACE OP ANCIENT 



occurred to such philologists, as it has to Sir Henry Rawlinson, possible 

 that Indo-European and Semitic might be traced to a common parent 

 form of speech.*^ Hitzig has discovered that the language of the Phil. 

 istines, intimately as they must have associated with the Phoenicians 

 proper to the north, the Hebrews in the east, and the Egyptians on 

 the south, manifests no Semitic but decidedly Indo-European affinities, 

 occupying a position midway between the Sanskrit and the Grreek.''^ 

 The theory of an ancient Cushite civilization has been developed in 

 recent years out of the language of the Himyaritic inscriptions, a 

 theory bearing much resemblance to the Finnic hypothesis of Arndt 

 and Rask. Traces of the Cushites are found with more or less dis- 

 tinctness in Phoenicia, Arabia, Persia, India, Chaldea, Ethiopia, 

 North Africa, Italy, Spain, and even in Ireland, by writers who have 

 adopted the Cushite hypothesis; and it is clearly shewn by them that 

 not a language in the world has escaped altogether from Himyaritic 

 influences.*^ In regard to alphabets we learn from Herodotus that the • 

 Ionian letters were much the same as the Phoenician.** Dr, Thomson, 

 the author of The Land and the Book, speaking of that famous monu. 

 ment of Phoenician literature, the inscribed sarcophagus of Ashmunazar, 

 says : " Many of the letters so clearly resemble those of our own alpha- 

 bet that we can scarcely be mistaken in tracing ours up through the 

 Eoman and the Grreek to that of PhcBuicia. Still more interesting is 

 the fact that the characters on this stone are so like the old Hebrew as 

 to establish' their clear relationship, if not their actual identity." *^ In 

 an article upon the Moabite stone so recently discovered, Dr. A. B- 

 Davidson has the following : " This primal Semitic inscription shows 

 that 900 years before Christ, at least, an alphabet was in use among 

 the Semitic tribes of Palestine; that the alphabet was employed in 

 public monuments by the meanest and lowest of them in the scale of 

 civilization ; that it is essentially the alphabet which we call Phoeni- 

 cian ; that, in all likelihood, it was common to all the Semitic races of 

 Asia, being also most probably invented by them ; that it is the alpha- 

 bet which was carried into Greece ; and that, as modified at Rome, it 

 is the alphabet which we now use. Further, though we cannot say 

 precisely at what date the Greeks received this alphabet, whether 



« Rawlinson's Herodotus, App. Bk. i., Essay vi., Sec. 18. 



*3 Hitzig, Urgeschiohte und Mytbologie der Philistaer, vi. 



*3 Baldwin, Prehistoric Nations. New York, 1869. 



« Herodot. v., 59. 



« Thomson, The Land and the Book. London, 1868, p. 139. 



