Part 1 (1/2)

Handbook of Universal Literature.

by Anne C. Lynch Botta.

PREFATORY NOTE TO THE REVISED EDITION.

Since the first publication of this work in 1860, many new names have appeared in modern literature. j.a.pan, hitherto almost unknown to Europeans, has taken her place among the nations with a literature of her own, and the researches and discoveries of scholars in various parts of the world have thrown much light on the literatures of antiquity. To keep pace with this advance, a new edition of the work has been called for.

Prefixed is a very brief summary of an important and exhaustive History of the Alphabet recently published.

PREFACE.

This work was begun many years ago, as a literary exercise, to meet the personal requirements of the writer, which were such as most persons experience on leaving school and ”completing their education,” as the phrase is. The world of literature lies before them, but where to begin, what course of study to pursue, in order best to comprehend it, are the problems which present themselves to the bewildered questioner, who finds himself in a position not unlike that of a traveler suddenly set down in an unknown country, without guide-book or map. The most natural course under such circ.u.mstances would be to begin at the beginning, and take a rapid survey of the entire field of literature, arriving at its details through this general view. But as this could be accomplished only by subjecting each individual to a severe and protracted course of systematic study, the idea was conceived of obviating this necessity to some extent by embodying the results of such a course in the form of the following work, which, after being long laid aside, is now at length completed.

In conformity with this design, standard books have been condensed, with no alterations except such as were required to give unity to the whole work; and in some instances a few additions have been made. Where standard works have not been found, the sketches have been made from the best sources of information, and submitted to the criticism of able scholars.

The literatures of different nations are so related, and have so influenced each other, that it is only by a survey of all that any single literature, or even any great literary work, can be fully comprehended, as the various groups and figures of a historical picture must be viewed as a whole, before they can a.s.sume their true place and proportions.

A.C.L.B.

INTRODUCTION.

THE ALPHABET.

1. The Origin of Letters.--2. The Phoenician Alphabet and Inscriptions.-- 3, The Greek Alphabet. Its Three Epochs.--4. The Medieval Scripts. The Irish. The Anglo-Saxon. The Roman. The Gothic. The Runic.

1. THE ORIGIN OF LETTERS.--Alphabetic writing is an art easy to acquire, but its invention has tasked the genius of the three most gifted nations of the ancient world. All primitive people have begun to record events and transmit messages by means of rude pictures of objects, intended to represent things or thoughts, which afterwards became the symbols of sounds. For instance, the letter _M_ is traced down from the conventionalized picture of an owl in the ancient language of Egypt, _Mulak_. This was used first to denote the bird itself; then it stood for the name of the bird; then gradually became a syllabic sign to express the sound ”mu,” the first syllable of the name, and ultimately to denote ”M,”

the initial sound of that syllable.

In like manner _A_ can be shown to be originally the picture of an eagle, _D_ of a hand, _F_ of the horned asp, _R_, of the mouth, and so on.

Five systems of picture writing have been independently invented,--the Egyptian, the Cuneiform, the Chinese, the Mexican, and the Hitt.i.te. The tradition of the ancient world, which a.s.signed to the Phoenicians the glory of the invention of letters, declared that it was from Egypt that they originally derived the art of writing, which they afterwards carried into Greece, and the latest investigations have confirmed this tradition.

2. THE PHOENICIAN ALPHABET.--Of the Phoenician alphabet the Samaritan is the only living representative, the Sacred Script of the few families who still wors.h.i.+p on Mount Gerizim. With this exception, it is only known to us by inscriptions, of which several hundred have been discovered. They form two well-marked varieties, the Moabite and the Sidonian. The most important monument of the first is the celebrated Moabite stone, discovered in 1868 on the site of the ancient capital of the land of Moab, portions of which are preserved in the Louvre. It gives an account of the revolt of the King of Moab against Jehoram, King of Israel, 890 B.C. The most important inscription of the Sidonian type is that on the magnificent sarcophagus of a king of Sidon, now one of the glories of the Louvre.

A monument of the early Hebrew alphabet, another offshoot of the Phoenician, was discovered in 1880 in an inscription in the ancient tunnel which conveys water to the pool of Siloam.

3. THE GREEK ALPHABET.--The names, number, order, and forms of the primitive Greek alphabet attest its Semitic origin. Of the many inscriptions which remain, the earliest has been discovered, not in Greece, but upon the colossal portrait statues carved by Rameses the Great, in front of the stupendous cave temple at Abou-Simbel, at the time when the Hebrews were still in Egyptian bondage. In the seventh century B.

C., certain Greek mercenaries in the service of an Egyptian king inscribed a record of their visit in five precious lines of writing, which the dry Nubian atmosphere has preserved almost in their pristine sharpness.

The legend, according to which Cadmus the Tyrian sailed for Greece in search of Europa, the damsel who personified the West, designates the island of Thera as the earliest site of Phoenician colonization in the Aegean, and from inscriptions found there this may be regarded as the first spot of European soil on which words were written, and they exhibit better than any others the progressive form of the Cadmean alphabet. The oldest inscriptions found on h.e.l.lenic soil bearing a definite date are those cut on the pedestals of the statues which lined the sacred way leading to the temple of Apollo, near Miletus. Several of those, now in the British Museum, range in date over the sixth century B.C. They belong, not to the primitive alphabet, but to the Ionian, one of the local varieties which mark the second stage, which may be called the epoch of transition, which began in the seventh and lasted to the close of the fifth century B.C. It is not till the middle of the fifth century that we have any dated monuments belonging to the Western types. Among these are the names of the allied states of h.e.l.las, inscribed on the coils of the three-headed bronze serpent which supported the gold tripod dedicated to the Delphian Apollo, 476 B.C. This famous monument was transported to Byzantium by Constantine the Great, and still stands in the Hippodrome at Constantinople. Of equal interest is the bronze Etruscan helmet in the British Museum, dedicated to the Olympian Zeus, in commemoration of the great victory off c.u.mae, which destroyed the naval supremacy of the Etruscans, 474 B.C., and is celebrated in an ode by Pindar.

The third epoch witnessed the emergence of the cla.s.sical alphabets of European culture, the Ionian and the Italic.