and others any more successful. So futile, indeed, seemed to be the efforts to trace this origin to Egypt and Mesopotamia, that the writer on "The Alphabet" in the eighth edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica published in 1853 declared in despair that "we must admit that it (the Alphabet) was not human, but a divine invention."
As a result of these failures and of his discovery of the alphabetic letters in Early Egypt before the use of Egyptian hieroglyph writing, and of a further comparative survey in other Mediterranean areas, Sir Flinders Petrie has formulated the theory that the Alphabetic Signs or Letters were not derived from any picture or hieroglyph writing, but were older than picture writing, that the alphabet with its letters was "not a systematic alphabet invented by a single tribe or individual in a developed civilization; on the contrary a wide body of signs had been gradually brought into use in primitive times for various purposes [as conventional owner's marks or trade-marks]; these were interchanged by trade and spread from land to land until the less-known and less-useful signs were ousted by those in more general acceptance; lastly, a ouple of dozen signs triumphed and thus formed the Alphabet; that the Alphabetic stage of signs was probably not reached till about 1000 B.C., and that in particular it was not originated by the Phœnicians nor derived from the Phœnician Alphabet, but arose "in North Syria." And he bases his argument for the priority of signs over picture-writing largely on the assumption that a child draws signs before it draws good pictures.[1]
Here it will be noticed amongst other things, that Sir Flinders Petrie's theory offers no intelligible explanation of the peculiar forms of these alphabetic signs, nor how they came to have the definitely fixed vowel and consonantal values attached to them universally by their users. Moreover, by "Phœnicians" he merely means the late Semitized Phœni-
- ↑ Ib., 2 f.
