As a result of recent discoveries, some very interesting researches have been made in Egyptian paleography in what is known as the signary.* We reach signs which seem to be disconnected from the known hieroglyphs, and we are probably touching on the system of geometrical signs used from prehistoric to Roman times in Egypt, and also in other countries around the Mediterranean.

     * The information regarding the alphabet here given is
     derived from the Eighteenth Memoir of the Egypt Exploration
     Fund, 1899-1890.

How far these signs are originally due to geometrical invention, or how far due to corruption of some picture, we cannot say.  But in any case they stood so detached from the hieroglyphic writing and its hieratic and demotic derivations, that they must be treated as a separate system.  For the present the best course is to show here the similarity of forms between these marks and those known in Egypt in earlier and later times, adding the similar forms in the Karian and Spanish alphabets.  The usage of such forms in the same country from about 6000 B.C. down to 1200 B.C., or later, shows that we have to deal with a definite system.  And it seems impossible to separate that used in 1200 B.C. in Egypt from the similar forms found in other lands connected with Egypt from 800 B.C. down to later times:  we may find many of these also in the Kretan inscriptions long before 800 B.C.  The only conclusion then seems to be that a great body of signs—­or a signary—­was in use around the Mediterranean for several thousand years.  Whether these signs were ideographic or syllabic or alphabetic in the early stages we do not know; certainly they were alphabetic in the later stage.  And the identity of most of the signs in Asia Minor and Spain shows them to belong to a system with commonly received values in the later times.

What then becomes of the Phoenician legend of the alphabet?  Certainly the so-called Phoenician letters were familiar long before the rise of Phoenician influence.  What is really due to the Phoenicians seems to have been the selection of a short series (only half the amount of the surviving alphabets) for numerical purposes, as A = 1, E = 5, I = 10, N = 50, P = 100.

[Illustration:  309.jpg TABLE OF COMPARATIVE SYMBOLS]

This usage would soon render these signs as invariable in order as our own numbers, and force the use of them on all countries with which the Phoenicians traded.  Hence, before long these signs drove out of use all others, except in the less changed civilisations of Asia Minor and Spain.  According to our modern authorities this exactly explains the phenomena of the early Greek alphabets; many in variety, and so diverse that each has to be learned separately, and yet entirely uniform in order.  Each tribe had its own signs for certain sounds, varying a good deal; yet all had to follow a fixed numerical system.  Certainly all did not learn their forms from an independent Phoenician alphabet, unknown to them before it was selected.