VII
Individual Letters and their Evolution from Sumerian Parents
The Sumerian parentage and evolution of the alphabetic letters, ancient and modern, is thus disclosed and established by these tables. And it is seen that notwithstanding their abbreviated form for rapidity in writing — a form already attained in Pre-dynastic and Early-Dynastic Egypt for popular and secular use — most of the letters even in our modern alphabet still retain the leading features of the object represented in their ancestral Early Sumerian pictograms. Thus A has the features of a wavelet, as the aquatic sign, B a mass in division or bi-sected, and so on.
The early Sumerians wrote their pictograms upright or vertically, but later in Mesopotamia they turned them on their sides to the left hand of the writer, to face the left, in their system of writing and reading from left to right in the Aryan fashion. This accounts for some of the alphabetic letters in the "Phœnician" script being turned on their left sides, such as the "Semitic Phœnician" A which is the Cadmean turned on its left side (see Plate I), and similarly for the slanting of the ribs of the E, H, etc., in that script.
The somewhat varying form of the letters in different local alphabets is obviously due partly to local mannerisms or conventional writing analogous to the variant local forms given to the Sumerian pictograms when reproduced in the more elaborate and artistic Egyptian hieroglyphs and in the Sumerian hieroglyphs on the Indo-Sumerian seals
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