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

AUTHORSHIP OF THE ALPHABETIC WRITING 65

letters. Thus the Sumerian word-sign Bary or Par “ Fore or before’ 1 they spelt out with three signs as Pa-ra-a; the Sumerian Ba-dur, ‘“‘ Water,’ * they spelt with three signs as Ba-a-dar, Ba-a-tar or Wa-a-tar in series with our English “ Water’ and the Greek Udor ; their own tribal or national name Khat-ti as it is spelt in Sumerian they spelt out as Kha-at-ti or Kha-ad-ti ; their Sumerian Father-god name In-dara, the Andvara title of Thor in the Eddas * they spelt In-da-ra and the god Uranos of the Greeks and the Varuna of the Hindus, or ‘‘ The Over-one,” * they spelt by five signs as U-ru-wa-na-as’, and so on.

This mono-consonantal writing of the Hittites was clearly a great step towards an alphabetic system, and we have seen that the Khad title of the Phoenicians was a dialectic form of the Hittite national title Khat or Khattt which the Hittites often spelled Kha-ad-ti. But so far no especially early alphabetic writing appears yet to have been found in Hittite Asia Minor (including Phrygia) and North Syria that is usually ascribed to before the seventh century B.c., carved on rocks and monuments, and stamped on the Cilician coins of the sixth century B.c.®

Now significantly, it is to this region, in its North Syria portion (which was essentially a Hittite province and was habitually called by the Assyrians “‘ Land of the Hittites ’’) ° that Sir F. Petrie is lead by quite another class of evidence to locate the origin of the alphabetic system. Exploring the use of alphabetic letters as numerals according to their position in the alphabet on the early coins, he finds the practice absent in Gréece, but the sites using this method are “ very thick all down Syria [including Pheenicia] and

1 See Bay, Pay, Fore, before in Dict. (WSAD.). 2 See Badur, Water in Dict. (WSAD.). 3 See Andava, Dav, Indava and Ia in Dict. (WSAD.); WPOB. 246, 315 £.; 334f.; WISD. 22 f. 4 See Bay and Uru in Dict. (WSAD.). 5 Cp. HCC. 51 f. ® See Budge, Hist. of Esavhaddon, 1881, pp. 103 f. and WPOB 274 f E