First Dynasty onwards used many of their hieroglyphs as alphabetic letters in their mixed syllabic and alphabetic system of writing. On this account, attempts were made to ascertain whether the Phœnician alphabet and letters were derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs either directly or from their later cursive and abbreviated form, the "hieratic," so-called from its use by the priests for writing on papyrus sheets with a pen.
But the hieroglyphs used by the Egyptians to represent consonantal sounds were very numerous. Each individual consonant was represented by a great variety of different hieroglyphs, often a dozen or more of those which happened to contain that particular consonant as its initial sound in the syllabic word of the hieroglyph. Yet, with all this varied number of hieroglyphs and their hieratic forms to select from in support of the theory of an Egyptian origin for the alphabetic letters, the results were held by Professor Lagarde and others to be unconvincing. M. E. de Rougé, the chief advocate of that theory, selected those signs favouring his hypothesis and constructed a table[1] in which he represented the letter A as derived from the Eagle hieroglyph, B from the Crane, G from the Throne, D from the Hand, E from the "Meander" and so on. Some of the superficial resemblances appeared plausible, but practically all of the alleged resemblances were deemed insufficient or accidental. Sir Flinders Petrie observed that "only two out of twenty-two letters were satisfactorily accounted for,"[2] and that the fact of the alphabetic letters being found in Pre-dynastic Egypt "long before the hieroglyphic system in Egypt, removed the last refuge of those writers who would see in them only a fresh type of cursive (Egyptian) hieroglyphics."[3] Nor were the attempts to trace the origin of the alphabet to the cuneiform writing of Babylonia by M. de Morgan, Delitzsch
