The Triumph of the Alphabet: A History of Writing

THE ALPHABET, THE MOST IMPORTANT AND THE MOST wide-spread system of writing in the world, is single and unique. It takes, indeed, many different forms. The sacred scriptures of the Hindus are written in the Indian Devanagari script, the Koran of the Moslems in the Arabic, the Old Testament in the Hebraic, and the New Testament in the Greek--these scripts are all variations developed from the same original: and from it too comes the alphabet in which our English Bible is written. They may all be traced back to a group of slightly divergent Semitic alphabets that were in use in the Near East, especially in Syria and Palestine, in the latter part of the second millennium B.C. From our point of view the most important of the Semitic alphabets was Phoenician, because from it came the Greek and hence the European forms. Since the Semitic script was the source of all later development of the alphabet, I shall first describe its nature. Then we shall consider the more debatable subject of its origin, which is still not finally settled.

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