December 12, 1890.] 



SCIENCE. 



325 



stead of seeking in Phoenicia the primitive home of the 

 alphabets of our modern world, we shall have to look for it 

 in Arabia. Canon Isaac Taylor, in his "History of the 

 Alphabet," had already found himself compelled by palseo- 

 graphic evidence to assign a much earlier date to tlie alpha- 

 bet of South Arabia than that which had previously been 

 ascribed to it, and the discoveries of Glaser and Hommel 

 show that he was right. 



As soon as we reverse the problem, and assume that the 

 Phoenician alphabetis later instead of earlier than the Minasan, 

 we obtain an explanaHon of niuch that has hitherto been puz- 

 zling. The names given to many of the Phoenician letters are 

 at last found to agree with the forms of the latter. It is only 

 in the South Arabian alphabets, for instance, that the letter 

 called pi (" the mouth "), our P, has the form of a mouth, 

 or that the first letter, aleph ("an ox "), really resembles the 

 head of that animal. Moreover, we can now understand 

 how it is that the South Arabian alphabets possess letters 

 which do not occur in the Phoenician alphabet, and are not 

 derived from any of the Phoenician characters. The Phoeni- 

 . cian language had lost certain sounds which comparative 

 philology has shown belonged to the Semitic pai'eut-speeeh, 

 and which were preserved in the languages of Arabia. That 

 these sounds should have been represented by special symbols 

 in the Arabian alphabets, if the latter had been borrowed 

 from the defective alphabet of Phoenicia, is unintelligible: in 

 such a case the symbols would have been modifications of 

 other symbols already existing in the alphabet, or else the 

 same symbol would have been allowed to express more than 

 one sound. This has actually happened in Hebrew, where 

 the same symbols stand respectively for 'ain and ghain, for 

 s and sh. There can be but one explanation of the fact that 

 the Arabian alphabets denote by independent symbols certain 

 sounds which had been lost in Phoenician pronunciation. 

 The Arabian alphabets are more primitive than the alphabet 

 of Phoenicia. When the latter first comes before us, it is in 

 a comparatively late and conventionalized form, widely re- 

 moved from the hieratic characters of Egypt, out of which it 

 is commonly supposed to have been developed. 



The discovery of the antiquity of writing among the pop- 

 ulations of Arabia cannot fail to influence the views that 

 have been current of late years in regard to the earlier his- 

 tory of the Old Testament. We have hitherto taken it for 

 granted that the tribes to whom the Israelites were related 

 were illiterate nomads, and that in Midian or Edom the in- 

 vaders of Palestine would have had no opportunity of making 

 acquaintance with books and written records. Before the 

 time of Samuel and David it has been strenuously maintained 

 that letters were unknown in Israel; but such assumptions 

 must now be considerably modified. The ancient Oriental 

 world, even in northern Arabia, was a far more literary one 

 than we have been accustomed to imagine; and as for 

 Canaan, the country in which the Israelites settled, fought, 

 and intermarried, we now have evidence that education was 

 carried in it to a surprisingly high point. In the principal 

 cities of Palestine an active literary correspondence was not 

 only can-ied on, but was maintained by means of a foreign 

 language and an extremely complicated script. There must 

 have been plenty of schools and teachers, as well as of pupils 

 and books. 



The latest revelation that has been furnished to us by the 

 tablets of Telel-Amarna relates to Jerusalem. Among the 

 tablets now in the Museum of Berlin, five have been found 

 which prove, upon examination, to have been letters sent 

 from the King or Governor of Jerusalem to the Egyptian 



sovereigns in the century before the exodus. The governor 

 in question was named Abdi-dhaba, or Ebed-tob as his name 

 would have been written in Hebrew. He describes himself 

 as occupying a more independent position than the governors 

 of most of the other towns of Palestine. They were merely 

 Egyptian officials. He, on the other hand, though he owned 

 allegiance to the Egyptian monarch, nevertheless claims to 

 have derived his power from "the oracle of the mighty 

 king." As one of the letters shows that this "mighty king" 

 was not the king of Egypt, but a deity, we are irresistibly 

 reminded of Melchizedek, the king of Salem, and priest of 

 "the most high God," from whom, therefore, the king de- 

 rived his authority. Last spring I had already recognized 

 the name of "Urusalim," or "Jerusalem," in one of the 

 Telel-Amarna tablets at Cairo, and one of those which I 

 copied in the collection of M. Bouriant tells us what was the 

 local name of the " most high God." The tablet is unfortu- 

 nately broken; but on one side of it we read, "The city of 

 the mountain of Jerusalem, the city of the temple of the god 

 Uras, (whose) name (there is) Marru, the city of the king 

 which adjoins (?) the locality of the men of Keilah." Marru 

 seems to be the same word as the Aramaic mare (" lord"). 

 He was identified with the Babylonian Uras, and his temple 

 stood on " the mountain " which was called Moriah, perhaps 

 in remembrance of the god. Long before the o'ays when 

 Solomon built the temple of Tahveh the spot on which it 

 stood had been the site of a hallowed sanctuary. 



The tablets at Berlin refer to transactions wi.ich had 

 taken place between Addi-dhaba and the "Kas^. " or Baby- 

 lonians; and in one of them an oracle of the ';^-l r ' Jerusa- 

 lem is quoted which declared, that, "so long as a ship crosses 

 the sea, — this (is) the oracle of the mighty king, — so long 

 shall the conquests continue of Nahrima and the Babyloni- 

 ans." Since Nahrima is the Aram-Naharaim of the Old 

 Testament, light is thrown on the account which is given us 

 in the Book of Judges of the eight-years' occupation of 

 southern Palestine by the king of that country. In Chushan- 

 rishathaim we must see a successor of the princes whose con- 

 quests were proclaimed by the oracle on Moriah. It was an 

 anticipation of the career which Balaam predicted for "the 

 Star of Jacob." 



Light is also thrown on a statement of the Egyptian his- 

 torian Manetho, which it has been the fashion to treat with 

 scant respect. He tells us that when the Hyksos were ex- 

 pelled from Egypt they built Jerusalem as a defence; not 

 against the Egyptians, as would naturally be expected, but 

 against "the Assyrians." In the age of Manetho, "Assyrians " 

 and " Babylonians" were synonymous terms. 



But though it is to the tablets of Telel-Amarna that we 

 must look for light upon the history of the Canaan which 

 the tribes of Israel invaded, it is rather from the monumental 

 records of ancient Arabia that we may expect to draw our 

 chiefest illustrations of the inner life and belief of the invad- 

 ing tribes themselves. One of these illustrations has already 

 been indicated by Professor Hommel. ' In one of the Arabiarii 

 inscriptions discovered by Euting we find the word laiCdn 

 used in the sense of " priests." The word is etymologically 

 tb^ same as the Hebrew Levi ; and when we remember that 

 Jethro, the priest of Midian, watched, as it were, over the birth 

 of the Israelitish priesthood, and had as his son-in-law the 

 Levite Moses, there opens out for us, as Professor Hommel 

 remarks, "a new and unexpected perspective in the history 

 of religion." A. H. Sayce. 



J Aufsatze und Abhandlungen zur kunde der Spraclien, Literaturen und 

 der Gefchlchte des vorderen Orients, Munich. 



