1864.] 



Application oftlie Soman Alphabet. 



349 



come, and when they did come, whom did they find in India ? Was it 

 the original tribes of the country, and did they exterminate them so 

 completely as to leave not a trace of their language —or was it an 

 earlier emigration of Scythian colonists, and did they drive them 

 southward before them so effectually as to leave no land-marks of 

 their occupation behind them ? These are questions admitting of much 

 argument ; but which I must leave to be discussed by those whom 

 they concern — the students of language and ethnology, and turn 

 again to our alphabets. 



The Bactrian alphabet, on the contrary, owes nothing to the Indian 

 model. It has been satisfactorily established that it is one of the 

 many off- shoots from the Phoenician parent tree. 



Now the Phoenico-Babylonic alphabet is the most ancient of which 

 we have any historic record. Monsieur Eenan in his Kistoire 

 generate des langues Semitiques, (probably following Gesenius who 

 some twenty-five years previously had expressed a similar opinion,) 

 thinks there is evidence sufficient to shew that the Hebrews wrote in 

 this alphabet on going up out of Egypt. I cannot say any thing for 

 or against this surmise ; but be it as it may, there is little doubt 

 that modifications of this alphabet were in spontaneous use from the 

 banks of the Indus to the straits of Gibralter, by the people of the 

 whole world as it was known to the ancients, about the eighth 

 century before Christ. From it the Greek alphabet was modelled; 

 from it the Aramaic, the Syriac, the Hebrew, the Arabic and the 

 many modifications of these alphabets have sprung ; and from it, also 

 we have the Moman alphabet. 



It would be impossible in a brief, hurried, and imperfect memoran- 

 dum, such as this, to give even a cursory outline of the history of the 

 progressive development of these alphabets, even if I had full materials 

 for the purpose ; which is not the case. For a long time we had no 

 better guide than Gesenius' work, published now some thirty years 

 ago ; but Dr. Levy's Fhonizische Studien, and the due de Luynes' valu- 

 able tables printed by Mr. E. Thomas, and since published inscrip- 

 tions, have added much to the world's knowledge on this subject 

 which is at once so interesting and instructive to the palaeographer, 

 the philologer, and the historian. But still light is required,— more 

 light,— and it is satisfactory to know that able scholars are deeply 

 engaged in investigating the comparative palaeography, as well as its 



