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THE HISTORY OF THE ALPHABET. 
By the Rev. Isaac Taylor, M.A. 
(Precis by the Author.) 
T HE history of the alphabet has been only known within 
the last few years. De Rouge’s great discovery of the 
derivation of the Semitic letters from the Egyptian hiero- 
glyphics has proved that the alphabet is the oldest existing 
monument of human civilization, — older than the Pyramids. 
There were three stages in its invention : — 
1. Ideograms, — pictures of things. 
2. Phonograms, — symbols of words and syllables. 
3. The letters of the alphabet. 
The lecturer gave various illustrations of ideograms and pho- 
nograms from the Chinese and Egyptian writing, and explained 
the nature of the Egyptian system of phonetics and determina- 
tives. After giving a brief account of the syllabic writing 
which was developed in Japan out of the Chinese, and in 
Cyprus out of the Cuneiform, he wont on to explain De Rouge’s 
discovery of the mode in which the Semites had selected 22 
letters out of the 400 Egyptian hieroglyphics, and thus 
formed that first alphabet, which had been the parent of 
all the alphabets of the world. By the aid of diagrams the 
lecturer traced the history of each letter of the English alpha- 
bet. He began by showing how the letter A was originally 
the picture of an eagle, B of a crane, M of an owl, L of a lion, 
and so on with the rest. He then exhibited the transition 
from the Hieroglyphic forms to the Hieratic forms found in 
the “ Papyrus Prisse,” the oldest book in the world, older than 
Abraham. He next explained how the alphabet on the 
Moabite stone, and that on the tomb of Eshmunazar, king 
of Sidon, were derived from the Hieratic writing of the 
“ Papyrus Prisse.” The lecturer then passed on to the de- 
velopment, from the Phoenician letters, of the early Creek, 
Etruscan, and Latin alphabets, boginning with the letters 
scrawled on the leg of tho Colossus at Abousimbul, in Nubia, 
