DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61301#0127
PHCENICIA.
99
Pausing a moment at Thebes, we must consider this
gift of the alphabet brought from the east. We have
seen that Egypt, through all the long course of her
civilization, yet never advanced entirely beyond her
system of ideographs, pictures of things instead of
pictures of the sounds that form their names. The effect
of this ideography, this picture-writing, on the art of
Egypt we have already noted. When and how the
Phoenicians borrowed from Egypt their ideographs and
transmuted them into phonetic symbols, signs for
sounds instead of pictures for things, it is not the place
here to inquire. It is enough to us to know that this
gift of the alphabet in part ready-made was one of the
richest gains of their trade with Egypt. We can well
understand how the Phoenicians with their keen, utili-
tarian spirit desired above all things a method of writing,
of communication, that should be short, easy, practical,
instead of an elaborate system that should be, as
Egyptian writing was, a complex and hard-won mono-
poly of the scholarly scribe. Probably it was this keen
utilitarianism of the trader that won for Europe this
inestimable gift of the alphabet; not the least of the
blessings that the Phoenician trader brought in his black
ship over the misty sea. The Greeks were thus early
saved from all the artistic perils of ideography, they
were also saved from long and arduous efforts in con-
structing an alphabet of their own. It seems as if on all
99
Pausing a moment at Thebes, we must consider this
gift of the alphabet brought from the east. We have
seen that Egypt, through all the long course of her
civilization, yet never advanced entirely beyond her
system of ideographs, pictures of things instead of
pictures of the sounds that form their names. The effect
of this ideography, this picture-writing, on the art of
Egypt we have already noted. When and how the
Phoenicians borrowed from Egypt their ideographs and
transmuted them into phonetic symbols, signs for
sounds instead of pictures for things, it is not the place
here to inquire. It is enough to us to know that this
gift of the alphabet in part ready-made was one of the
richest gains of their trade with Egypt. We can well
understand how the Phoenicians with their keen, utili-
tarian spirit desired above all things a method of writing,
of communication, that should be short, easy, practical,
instead of an elaborate system that should be, as
Egyptian writing was, a complex and hard-won mono-
poly of the scholarly scribe. Probably it was this keen
utilitarianism of the trader that won for Europe this
inestimable gift of the alphabet; not the least of the
blessings that the Phoenician trader brought in his black
ship over the misty sea. The Greeks were thus early
saved from all the artistic perils of ideography, they
were also saved from long and arduous efforts in con-
structing an alphabet of their own. It seems as if on all