the letters on the oldest Greek and Etruscan coins. The old Runes were inscribed on sticks or staves of wood, cut or shaved so as to expose three plain surfaces, and on these the right-lined letters were engraved with a stylus. These are what are alluded to by Aulus Gellius,[1] when he states the laws of Solon to have been engraved axibus ligneis, which have been mistranslated table or board. These two Latin words will bear no such construction.[2] They mean the staves or stems of trees used by the ancient Druids, as well as by the Greeks. And on them were inscribed the letters of the Ionian Greeks, which Herodotus says were originally composed of right lines.[3]
40. These inscribed stems were in part the origin of a vast variety of interesting allegories respecting trees, letters, and science, particularly among the Arabians and a numerous class of oriental philosophers called Gnostics.
41. The Greek system of notation is nearly the same as the Latin. The numbers are as follow: Ι, ΙΙ, ΙΙΙ, ΙΙΙΙ, Π, ΠΙ, ΠΙΙ, ΠΙΙΙ, ΠΙΙΙΙ, Δ, ΔΙ, ΔΙΙ, ΔΙΙΙ, ΔΙΙΙΙ, ΔΠ, ΔΔ 20, ΔΔΙ 21, ΔΔΠ 25, ΔΔΔ 30, &c. The principle is evidently the same, and all the letters consist of right lines easily made axibus ligneis; and though the ten, the sacred number, does not consist of an X, it does of an equilateral triangle, Δ, which I have no doubt was adopted for a mysterious reason, hereafter pointed out.
42. Pliny the Elder says, that the Ionian letters were the oldest of Greece, and that the most ancient Grecian letters were the same as the Etruscan; and as he produces the example of an ancient inscription to justify his assertion, it seems more worthy of attention than most of the idle, gossiping stories which he has collected together. We have just now seen that the most ancient of the Greek and Italian alphabets have a strong tendency to the right-lined practice. Now the question very naturally arises, who were, and whence came, the Ionians? This is a question which it is very easy to ask, but very difficult to answer,—a question which will be most intimately connected in the answer with some very abstruse and profound oriental doctrines into which I must enter in the course of the following work, and which will require much previous investigation. I shall, therefore, beg to suspend it for the present, but the reader will please to bear it in mind.
43. My reader is not to suppose that I imagine the process of the invention of letters took place literally by one pair of persons as I have here represented. What is meant is only to shew generally the nature of the process. The steps by which the result was obtained it is not possible, in the nature of things, to describe with accuracy. Various persons would from time to time be employed, or perhaps a society, on whom the natural causes which I have pointed out, or other causes similarly natural, would operate to produce the effect; for example, the number of the fingers of the hand creating the first class of numbers, the two hands the second class, &c.
44. From General Vallancey I learn a fact which strongly confirms my theory. He says, “The Phœnicians had numerals before they had letters. Their first numerals were similar to the Irish Ogham, marks consisting of straight, perpendicular lines, from one to nine, thus: I, II, III, IV, &c. Ten was marked with an horizontal line—; and these they retained after they had adopted the Chaldean alphabetic numerals.”[4]—“There cannot be a stronger proof that numerals preceded letters, than the Hebrew word ספר Spr, sepher, which properly signifies to number, to cipher: numeration, numbering: but after numerals were applied as literary characters, the same word denoted, as it does at this day, a scribe, a letter, a book, a literary character.”[5] Bates says, the word sepher has all the senses of the Latin calculus. Mr. Hammer, of Vienna, found in Egypt an Arabic manuscript which is written in Arabic words, but in a character which is evidently the same as the tree Ogham of Ireland. See Plate I. Fig. I. The word Ogham or Agham is Indian, and means secret or mysterious.
45. From various circumstances it is not improbable that these right-lined figures had originally the names of trees. In the infant state of society, so large a number of letters or signs for an alphabet as twenty-eight, would be rather an incumbrance than an advantage. It would take a long time for man to discover the advantage of a correct sign for every vocal sound which he was capable of uttering, and he probably made a selection of sixteen of them: the first sixteen, perhaps. In our names of numbers there is not now the least appearance of the names of the letters or trees:
- ↑ The words of Gellius are, In Legibus Solonis, illis antiquissimis, quæ Athenis, axibus ligneis incisæ erant. Some learned men, not understanding the nature of the ancient staves on which letters were accustomed to be inscribed, have wished to substitute assibus for axibus. Had they succeeded, they would have completely changed the sense of the author, and have concealed the interesting fact, that the ancient Irish and the Greeks used the same mode of writing. The emendations of Editors have done infinite mischief to science. I have no objection to emendations suggested in notes, but scarcely ever ought they to be carried into the text. By emendations, as authentic records, the Old and New Testaments have, in innumerable instances, been rendered doubtful as to their real meaning.
- ↑ See Celtic Druids, Chap. I. Sect. xxxi.
- ↑ Ibid. Sect. xxxi. xxxii.
- ↑ Vall. Col. Vol. V. pp. 183—186.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 175.
