The art of writing must, however, have been known to the Hebrews at an early period of their history. Hiram, we are told, wrote a letter to Solomon, and David wrote a letter to Joab. From the lists of the kings and dukes of Edom, preserved in Gn 36 and 1 Ch 1, we gather that the Edomites, at the time when their capital was taken by Joab in the reign of David, possessed state annals, going back to a remote period. The list of the encamp- jients of the Israelites in the Desert, given in Nu 33, cannot have been handed down by oral tradition ; while it is the only incorporated docu- ment in the Pent, which we are expressly told was written down by Moses, and its geogr. correctness !.as been curiously contirmed by recent researches.
1 he census of the congregation preserved in Nu 1-4 and 26 is also manifestly a very ancient written record which has been incorporated in the text. All these documents were presumably written in the primitive Sem. A. But the discoveries of the la.st few years have led scholars to believe that non-alphabetic writing of another kind was used in Pal. long before the Exodus, as early as the reign of Khu-n-Aten, the recent excavations at Lachish and the discoveries at Tel el-Aniariia l>roving that the governors of the Syrian cities
corresponded with the Ecyj' kings in a cursive form of the Babylonian cuneiform.
The oldest known forms of the Sem. letters are shown in col. 3 of the table, where their names and their approximate phonetic values may also be found.
Thirteen may be represented by letters in our own Alphabet. These are beth, gimel, daleth, he, zayin, kaph, lamed, mem, nun, samekh, pe, resh, and tau, which correspond to our letters b, g, d, h, z, k, I, m, n, s, p, r, and t. The other nine letters repre- sent sounds which we do not exactly possess. Of these, two are called 'Unguals,' or 'emphatics,' namelj', teth, a gutturalised t, which is called the emphatic dental, and zade, a gutturalised s, called the emphatic sibilant. The Tetter koph was not our q, but a k formed farther back in the throat, and here represented by k. There are also four 'faucal breaths,' 'aleph, he, heth, and 'ayin, of which 'aleph, the lightest, was a slightly explosive consonant, heard in English after the word No ! when uttered abruptly, and nearly equivalent to the spirit us lenis of the Greeks ; 'ayin was a sound of the same kind, but harder th&n' aleph, approach- ing a g rolled in the throat ; heth, called the ' fricative faucal,' was a continuous guttural, resembling the ch in the Scotch lock ; and he was a fainter sound of the same kind, approaching our A. The primitive sound of shin was probably that of our sh, but was subject to dialectic variation. Yod and vau were semi-consonants, or rather consonantal vowels, usually equivalent to y and v, but passing readily into t and u.
None of the Sem. A.s have possessed symbols for the true vowels, which are now denoted, not by letters, but by diacritical points, a notation essentially non-alphabetic, and not of any great antiquity. The vowels in non-Semitic A.s, such as Greek, Zend, Armenian, Georgian, Sanskrit, and Mongolian, have been developed out of char- acters representing the Sem. breaths and semi- consonants. Thus the Gr. alpha, whence our A, was obtained from 'aleph, the spiritus lenit ; epsilon, whence our E, is from he, an aspirate ; eta and our H from heth, the fricative faucal ; iota and our I and J from yod, a semi-consonant ; omicron and omega, and our O, from 'ayin, the spiritus asper ; while ups-Uun and our U, V, W, Y, and F, came from vau, a semi-consonant.
Besides the absence of symbols for the vowels, most of the Sem. scripts, Heb., Syr., and Arab., agree in being written from right to left, the direction following the example of the prototype, the Hieratic of the Papyrus Prisse, whereas in the non - Sem. scripts tue direction has mostly been changed. The Sem. A.s have also adhered to the primitive 22 letters, none of which have fallen into disuse, any additional notation required being etiected by diacritical points, whereas in other scripts new forms have been evolved by difl'erentia- tion, as in the case of our own letters V, U, W, Y, and F, which are all diU'erentiated forms of the same symbol.
The pictorial character of the Hieroglyphs had disappeared in the Hieratic of the Papyrus Prisse, and hence it is no matter for surprise to find that the Egyp. symbols were renamed by the Semites, on the acrologic principle, by words significant in Sem. speech, the new names being due to a resem- blance, real or fanciful, between the form assumed by the letter and some object whose name began with the letter in question, as in our nursery picture-books, in which O is an orange, S a swan, and B a butterfly. Thus the first symbol was no longer ahum, the 'eagle,' as in Egyp., but became 'alcph, the 'ox,' from the resemblance to the front view of the head and horns of that animal ; and the 13lh, insteadof beinu' mulak, the 'owl,' became»i«»7i, the ' waters,' what liad been the ears and beak of