the encumbrances of ideographs or determinatives. This we find first among the Phoenicians; but the analogy between it and what we have just been considering is so clear that we need have no hesitation in calling its origin Egyptian. We We may believe that the Hyksos race, while in that country, adopted the phonetic system in the hieroglyphics, applying it to their own language; and, scorning the efforts of the Egyptian priests to confine knowledge to their own class by entangling it among the ideographic and determinative forms to which they alone had the key, this more simple and practical shepherd-race constructed an alphabet free from such encumbrances and open to the use of all. This alphabet, rejecting the employment of numerous figures (as, for instance, sea, sword, star, &c., for the sound S), uses one figure for any one initial sound, and has all its letters phonetic, rejecting the use of ideographs and symbolic forms. Thus every one could read, and knowledge became open to all. This race, as already noticed, had probably extended their settlements along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean previous to their final expulsion from Egypt; and from them grew up the great maritime cities of Sidon and Tyre, which afterward sent their colonies far to the west, even into Spain, and it is said as far as Britain. That their idea of representing sounds by figures, taking the initial sound in each figure, is copied from the Egyptian, will be evident from the following alphabet, gathered from Phœnician inscriptions yet remaining. It will be seen that every letter is a picture, such as could be rapidly drawn, of an object or part of an object, the initial sound in whose name. furnishes the power of that letter. We annex also the Hebrew alphabet as deduced from Hebrew coins; and then we give the Greek (from which comes our own alphabet), and the reader will see that the letters which he is now looking at in this present book are through the Greek derived from the Phoenician; and doubtless through the Phoenician, had

i From the Sidon sarcophagus, about B. C. 599.

their first start in the phonetic efforts of the Egyptians on their monuments. This is a long history, but such progressive effort of the human mind is certainly a very interesting one. Our own A is here seen to be a picture of an ox's head, roughly sketched, but showing the horns, ears and nose, and has the power of the initial sound in the Phoenician or Hebrew word Aleph, ox. Our B is taken from the picture of a tent or house, in Hebrew, Beth, and so giving us the B sound. Our G is not so close a copy but is evidently from the Greek I, and this from the Hebrew word Gimel, camel, the long neck and head of which can be traced in the Hebrew letter, and still better in the Phoenician. Our D is a still nearer approach than the Greek to the original Daleth, door; and so through the remainder, where the reader can for himself trace the resemblance, and the origin of nearly all our alphabet. We have also the means of tracing the Samaritan alphabet to an ancient date; and the hostile jealousies between those people and the Jews from B. C. 721 to the present time are a warrant that the Samaritan is not simply a copy from the Hebrew, with which, however, it is almost indentical. Of Phoenician inscriptions there are several remaining, among them one hundred and twenty votive tablets; but the best and longest is a recent discovery in the neighborhood of Sidon. A native, digging there for treasure in 1855, disinterred a sarcophagus of blueblack basalt, eight by four feet in size, on the surface of which is sculptured a human figure much resembling those on the Egyptian mummy cases. On this there is an inscription in twenty-two lines, the letters in perfect condition, and the resemblance between them and what we see on the Hebrew coins so close, and the language also so similar to the Hebrew, that scholars conversant with the latter have little trouble in making a translation. It informs us that "King Esmunazar, king of the Sidonians," &c., had this tomb prepared for himself. "Carried away before my time," it says,

"in the flood of days-in dumbness ceases the son of gods. Dead do I lie in this tomb in the grave, in the place which I have built;" and then it proceeds to warn all men not to "disturb him in the couch of his slumbers," with imprecations on any one who may molest his remains. The time of the sarcophagus is supposed to be about 599 B. C., but the completeness and finish of the character shows this to have been in use long before that time.

For inscriptions distinctly Hebrew we have to resort to Jewish coins, the earliest of which was that of Simon Maccabæus (B. C. 139). Such coinage was continued under the successive rulers till B. C. 40; the characters used are nearly or quite identical with those on the Phoenician monuments.' We have given finally, in the above table, the square Hebrew alphabet in present use. It seems to have had its origin during "the captivity," when the Jews became familiar with the neat, arrow-headed character in use by the Euphrates. The change to this form commenced, it is supposed, in the time of Ezra, and advancing gradually, was not complete till the first century of our era. The letters in the square alphabet are evidently those referred to by our Saviour in his Sermon on the Mount, the word "tittle," in the original zepaia, horn (Matt. v. 18), meaning the horn-like protuberance which the reader may see on several letters of this square form (for instance ), while in this alphabet the yod "(jot)" is also strikingly smaller than any of the other letters.

Inasmuch, then, as the language on the Phoenician monuments and in the Pentateuch may be considered as the same, and the written characters employed by both being also apparently identical, we are able, from such means, to place here before the reader what is probably a correct representation of the first verse in Genesis and the first of the ten commandments as they were originally written. The reader

1 See "History of Jewish Coinage," &c., by F. W. Madden, M.R.S.L.

will observe that the reading is from right to left; for that was the mode of writing then, as it is still in the Arabic:

The vast improvement by the Phoenicians in simplifying phonetics seems to have reacted upon the people from whom they drew their first idea of thus addressing the ear through the eye, and to have produced among the Egyptians what we find as their most simple form of writing, namely, the