memorial, used it; that the Phoenicians, and the Syrians of Palestine, acknowledged that they had borrowed the custom from Egypt; that the Egyptians certainly communicated it to the other nations by means of their commercial knowledge; and that in his time it had fallen into disuse among the Phoenicians connected with Greece. (Lib. ii. c. 104.) Again, every scholar knows that nothing can be positively affirmed respecting the language and mode of writing of the Phoenicians, except so far as it agrees with that of the Samaritans, the same system of alphabetical characters being denominated sometimes by the one name and sometimes by the other, while, of the language of their descendants, the Carthaginians, we are in the same state of ignorance. With these qualifications, I believe my observations with respect to the Shemitic people and languages will hold good, and if not altogether conclusive, tend to lead to something better. IX. The Sanskrit, or Indian family of languages, may be regarded as characterised by the following leading qualities or peculiarities; as the class, however, is much more numerous than the Shemitic, the exceptions will be found to constitute a much larger amount, and the rules themselves will require to be received with greater allowance and modification. 1. Most of the people speaking such of these languages as are living ones, or who did speak such of them as are become dead ones, do not use, nor ever have used, the rite of circumcision. 2. They have a particular name for every day of the week, borrowed from the deity to whom it is devoted. 3. Many of them write all the vowels, and many more omit them to a less extent, than the people using the Arabic class of languages. 4. Their verbs have no gender in the different tenses. 5. The greater part of them have at least five tenses, and in many instances these tenses are formed by the aid of the auxiliary verb, To be. For the sake of greater clearness, perhaps, it will be desirable to say a few words under each of these divisions: 1. The passage quoted from Herodotus would prove conclusively, were there no other authority, that the rite of circumcision neither originated with, nor can be regarded as peculiar to, the Mosaic Law. But there is older and better authority, for in Genesis, xvii. 10., we read, "every man child among you shall be circumcised." And in the Generations of Sanchoniatho, we meet with the following passage, "Moreover, Cronus visiting the different regions of the habitable world, gave to his daughter Athena the kingdom of Attica; and when there happened a plague with a great mortality, Cronus offered up his only begotten son as a sacrifice to his father, Ouranos, and circumcised himself, and compelled his allies to do the same." (Cory's Ancient Fragments, p. 14.) The modern Persians, in common with every other people who have submitted their necks to the yoke of the Koran, received as a matter of course the rite of circumcision; but I believe it was entirely unknown to their ancestors as a religious ceremony. 2. The names of the days of the week cannot but be regarded as a most peculiar and characteristic circumstance; and, what is not a little remarkable, they are not only devoted to the same deities, but follow each other in the same order in India and Europe. (Jones, vol. iv. p. 87.) I have read the names myself in Sanskrit, Canara, and Mahratta; the Roman names are familiar to every classical scholar, and have been adopted by all the nations of southern Europe; while the Germans and ourselves have followed the Anglo-Saxons. I cannot discover that the Greeks had particular names for the days of the week, as the Romans had, except in one instance; for the custom of regarding the seventh day of every month as sacred to the sun, appears to be at least as old as the Works and Days of Hesiod; and the reason assigned for it is because Phoebus, Apollo, or the Sun, was born on that day. "Of each new moon, the rolling year around, The first, the fourth, the seventh are prosperous found; ELTON'S Hesiod. 3. In all the writings of the Greeks which have come down to us, the vowels are expressed; but in many of the Etruscan inscriptions, which can be regarded in no other light than a more ancient species of Greek writing, we are assured by the intelligent Lanzi, and may easily convince ourselves with our own eyes, that the vowels were omitted to a considerable extent. There is very little contraction in the ordinary mode of writing Sanskrit, except that a short is never written except at the commencement of a word, when its sound is required after a consonant as a medial or final, it being pronounced with it as in the alphabet, much in the mode proposed by the Anti-Masorists in reading Hebrew. We are assured by Anquetil du Perron, that in the Zendish not only are the vowels all written, but also the long and the short clearly discriminated by appropriate characters. Together with the alphabet of the Arabians, the modern Persians have adopted their mode of writing, and omit the vowels to an equal extent. 4. With respect to the gender of verbs, it is a most material circumstance in illustrating the origin and progress of language. The discriminations of gender in the persons of the different tenses are clearly so many pronominal terminations added to a root or theme. 5. With regard to the numerous tenses of the Sanskrit, or Indian class of languages, as all the Shemitic nations have contrived to do with two only, more than that number cannot be regarded as absolutely necessary. And this circumstance may lead us to suspect that in the Greek irregular verbs many of the tenses are not formed from the theme under which they are arranged in the lexicon, but from some obsolete root which has disappeared, and which, when discovered, renders the formation of all the tenses regular. Also, that in the regular verbs the double futures and aorists were derived from distinct themes, and that, consequently, the Greek verb has strictly but five tenses, like the Latin, and the first aorist in addition. 13 CHAP. II. ON THE OLDEST NAMES AND FORMS OF ANY EXISTING ALPHABETICAL CHARACTERS. 1. THE elder Pliny in his work, which must be regarded as in some measure the encyclopædia of classical antiquity, has a chapter on the inventions of the ancients, which, though not so long as the history of Beckman, contains much that is interesting and curious. Among other matters he has a few words to say on the origin of alphabetical writing. "I suppose letters," says he, "to have been the invention of the Assyrians, but others with Gellius ascribe them to the Egyptians instructed by Mercury, while others again insist on it that they were first used by the Syrians. At any rate, Cadmus brought sixteen letters into Greece from Phoenicia; to which, during the Trojan war, Palamedes is related to have added four-Theta, Xi, Phi, and Chi-and Simonides as many more at a subsequent period- Zeta, Eta, Psi, and Omega — the power of all of which we recognise in our Roman alphabet. Aristotle enlarges the primitive alphabet of sixteen letters to eighteen, by the addition of Zeta and Phi, and prefers ascribing the introduction of Theta and Chi to Epicharmus, rather than to Palamedes. Anticlides relates that letters were invented in Egypt by a person of the name of Menon (Memnon), fifteen years before the reign of Phoroneus, the most ancient king of Greece (B. C. 1822), and endeavours to establish the fact by historical documents. On the other hand Epigenes, an author of no inconsiderable weight, teaches the existence of astronomical observations at Babylon, recorded on baked tiles 720 years old, or according to Berosus and Critodemus, at least 480 years old. From all these circumstances the use of letters appears to have been almost eternal. They were brought into Latium by the Pelasgi. (C. Plinii Nat. Hist. lib. vii. c. 56. cum notis var.) II. It may have the appearance of ingratitude to assert that almost the whole of this information is little better than mythology, with hardly a vestige of an historical character, yet such I believe will prove to be the case when it is carefully sifted. The clue to the whole will be found in the fact, that the sun, under innumerable names, was the earliest god of almost the whole human race, and that to him was ascribed the foundation of all empires, the establishment of all laws, and the invention of all arts and sciences. It was remarked by Sir Isaac Newton in his Chronology, that Cadmus is merely the Hebrew word Kedem, the east (or the sun), and Phoenicia his country is no more, as the Egyptian Phoenix was a name of the sun, and its pretended death and resuscitation a highly poetical allegory, in the oriental taste, of sun-set and sun-rising. Mercury, the Egyptian Taut, or Hermes, is a name of the sun from two Persic words, Mir, Lord, and Khur the sun. Memnon is the sun, being the progeny of Aurora, or the dawn; and Tithonus, corrupted from Titan, or Chthon, the earth. Phoroneus is the sun, from two Coptic words, the definite article, masculine, Phi, and Ouro, king; the king, that is, of the host of heaven, consisting of the planets and stars in general. In Hebrew Pharaoh, in French Pharaon, which approximates very nearly to Phoroneus. III. So much for those by whom letters are said to have been invented, and next as to the letters themselves. It may seem paradoxical to assert, that after the lapse of two thousand, or two thousand five hundred years, we are in a better situation for investigating the antiquities of Greece than the Greeks themselves were; yet this is undoubtedly the case with regard to the origin of letters; for the Greeks and Romans were so indifferent about the languages of those they were pleased to denominate barbarians, that it is doubtful if Pliny, or any of the authors named by him, including Aristotle himself, had ever taken the trouble to inspect the alphabet of any one oriental language; and whether we bring the fabulous Cadmus from Egypt with Tacitus, or from Arabia with Strabo, or from Phoenicia Proper with Pliny |