The Story of the Alphabet

The printed letters or sound-signs which compose our alphabet are about two thousand five hundred years old. "Roman type" we call them, and rightly so, since from Italy they cam...

When treating of the sources whence civilisation flowed westward centuries before Greece and Rome appear, the historian turns to the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. For E...

The Greeks succeeded to the sovereignty of the sea after they had driven the Phœnicians from the Ægean. They were skilful shipbuilders and navigators, and their maritime enterpr...

Thus far curiosity alone gives the stimulus to acquaintance with ancient scripts--a feeling of aloofness attending all that we learn of Chinese, Maya, and other systems having n...

The interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics being thus settled once and for all, the next problem to be attacked was their relation, if any, to the sound-signs whence are d...

With the foregoing references to some of the most venerable documents that have yet come to light, we may leave Assyria for Egypt, no longer a land of marvel and of mystery, wit...

The Runic alphabet originated among the Scandinavians, who probably adapted it from some other script, since no traces of any pictographic characters whence it may have been der...

"What is ever seen is never seen," and it may be questioned if one in ten thousand of the readers of to-day ever pauses to ask what is the history of the conventional signs call...

We may, without further preface, advance to our main purpose, which is to supply an account of the stages through which the alphabets of the civilised world passed before they r...

China, whose inertia is being aroused by foreign "pin-pricks," is the land of arrested developments, and consequently its writing has remained for probably two thousand years at...

The expressions given above occur on the famous Rosetta Stone, an inscribed slab of black basalt, which has proved to be of priceless value in supplying the key to the interpret...