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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Few people ever give a thought to the origin of the alphabet they use beyond the Latin or perhaps Greek characters, and fewer still are aware that many letters in daily use now have scarcely altered their shapes in the last 3,000 years. This would mean that the inventors have given finality to some letters and all but finality to others. Nothing could be more satisfactory than this, yet the question of the origin of alphabetic writing remains a profound mystery. Many famous scholars have attempted to solve this mystery, have displayed amazing ingenuity and profound learning, yet the result thus far has only been divergent opinions and theories which flatly contradict one another.
page 964 note 1 “Mémoiré sur l'origine de l'alphabet phénicien,” Paris, 1874Google Scholar (read before the Académie des Inscriptions in 1859).
page 964 note 2 New edition, London, 1899 (pp. 89 seqq.).
page 964 note 3 Symmicta, i, p. 113.
page 964 note 4 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., art. “Hebrew”, p. 597.
page 965 note 1 Evans, , Scripta Minoa (Oxford, 1909, pp. 79 seqq.)Google Scholar, is inclined to assume that the Phœnician inventors of the alphabet might have been influenced, through the medium of the Philistines, by ancient Cretan “linear or quasi-alphabetic writing”. Some of these Cretan characters show, indeed, a striking resemblance to Phœnieian ones, but the latter represent a much younger type. This resemblance is therefore a mere accidental one, and has probably grown out of quite heterogeneous elements. Thus far there exists no indication of any literary influence exercised by the Philistines on Canaanite culture, no inscriptions having been found on Philistine soil.
page 966 note 1 (1) Mélanges d'épigraphie sémitique, p. 168. (2) “Nouvelles considerations sur l'origine de l'alphabet”: Revue sémitique, ix, pp. 356–70. (3) “Un dernier mot sur l'origine de l'alphabet”: ibid., x, pp. 331–46. See also Lidzbarski, , Ephemeris, i, pp. 128 seqq. and 261 seqqGoogle Scholar.
page 966 note 2 ZDMG., xxxi, pp. 102 seqq.
page 966 note 3 Die Entstehung des ältesten ScJiriftsystems oder der Uraprung der Keihchriftzeichen (Leipzig, 1877), p. 221Google Scholar: “Ausblick auf das phönikische Alphabet.”
page 967 note 1 The italics are mine.
page 968 note 1 Vol. i, pp. 269 seqq.
page 969 note 1 Ueber den Ursprung ties kanaanäischen Alphabets, Berlin, 1906Google Scholar.
page 971 note 1 Proceedings, vol. xxxii, pp. 215–22.
page 973 note 1 Ephemeris, ii, 128 seqq.
page 975 note 1 Phoenizische Studien, i, p. 49.