Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Waddell Laurence Austine
Title : The aryan origin of the alphabet : disclosing the sumero phoenician parentage of our letters ancient and modern
Year : 1927

Link download : Waddell_Laurence_Austine_-_The_aryan_origin_of_the_alphabet.zip

"Numbers, too, I taught them and (Writing -) how By marshalled signs to fix their shifting thoughts." - Prometheus Bound: Æschylus, trans. by J. S. Blackie. "The two greatest inventios of the human mind are Writing and Money - the common language of intelligence and the common language of selfinterest." - Mirabeau. The invention of the Alphabet is generally admitted to be one of the very greatest scientific human achievements. It enables civilized men by an easy system of some twenty-four or so sound-signs or letters to rapidly express and register their thoughts and speak through time and space, conduct their everyday business by registers and correspondence, and chronicle their experience for the use of future generations by permanent records. And amongst other things, in association with movable type and the telegraph, which is also based upon a conventional form of the Alphabet, it has made possible that living marvel of the modern world, the newspaper, "the beating heart of civilization," which gives the news of the world as a diary of the human race. Hitherto, the origin of our Alphabet, the objects represented by its signs or letters and its authors have remained unknown, although the subject of many diverse conjectures. Nevertheless, its authors have been assumed to be Semites by all modern writers, the one mechanically repeating the other. This is partly because Greek tradition ascribed the introduction of the Alphabet and Writing to the Phoenicians under King Cadmus of Tyre, a people who have latterly been regarded by modern writers, but not by the Greeks, as Semites - though wrongly so, as we have seen by the new evidence; and partly because the earliest hitherto published specimens of systematic alphabetic writing which can be read and approximately dated have been in the retrograde form of the Phoenician alphabet and in a Semitic dialect, which was often used in Semitic communities by the later Phoenician kings and merchants, who are thus assumed to have been Semites themselves. And this assumed Semitic racial character of the Phoenicians is persisted in notwithstanding the fact that the Phoenicians were called by the Hebrews "Sons of Ham," and not "Sons of Shem" or Semites, and thus were regarded by the Hebrews or Semites themselves as Non-Semites. ...