The Aryan origin of the alphabet : disclosing the Sumero-Phœnician parentage of our letters ancient & modern

I ANCESTRY OF THE ALPHABETS ve [THE PHCNICIANS

THE vast majority, if not all, of the alphabets of the world are generally regarded as descended from one, the oldest known, ‘‘ The Pheenician,” which, in its non-reversed form the ‘‘Cadmean Phcenician,’’! is the immediate parent of our modern English and European alphabet. The name “Cadmeian ”’ 2 was applied to it by the early Greeks after its introducer, King Cadmus the Phcenician of Tyre. The number of apparently disconnected alphabets has been steadily reduced by modern discovery and research, and the further evidence elicited in this volume and in my Sumer-Aryan Dictionary, disclosing the Sumero-Phcenician origin of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and alphabet, still further reduces them.

The earliest-known instances of reversed or “ Semitic” (or rather, according to the Hebrew nomenclature, Hamutzc) Phoenician alphabetic writing until a year ago dated, with the exception of the reversed Cadmean in the Isle of Thera in the #gean, no earlier than the Moabite Stone written in the Moabite ‘‘ Semitic’ language, and a bowl inscribed to the god Bel or Baal of Lebanon in Pheenicia, both of the ninth century B.c., and an inscribed sarcophagus of Ahiram from the old Phcenician seaport capital of Byblos or Gebal in Phoenicia, and supposed to be of the tenth century B.C. And it was universally assumed that the Phcenicians themselves dated no earlier than “about 1000 B.c.” In 1925, however, writing of the same type was found on the bust

1 For early reversed Cadmean, see later on. 2 Kadméia grammata. 3