The Alphabet. An Account of the Origin and Development of Letters Aryan Alphabets

of all the Pharaohs carved this great precipice of rock into a stupendous temple-cave dedicated to the great gods of the land of Egypt and committed to its walls the annals of his reign and the records of his distant conquests; trusting and not in vain that the desolate solitudes of Nubia would guard more faithfully the memories of his glory than the palaces and temples which he reared in the [...] Not to speak of the time required for the change in the direction of the writing or for the evolution of the vowels the mere modifications in the forms of the letters must have taken many successive generations to bring about. [...] As regards the direction of the writing the forms powers and number of the letters the Abu Simbel records exhibit all the characteristic fetures which distinguish the Greek from the Phoenician alphabet. [...] These names may be taken to illustrate the two chief stages in the transition from the alphabet of Phoenicia to the alphabet of Greece ; the change in the direction of the writing and in the value of the characters. [...] As the extension of Phoenician commerce to the shores and isles of Greece may be placed as early as the i2th century we should still obtain a period of two or three centuries for the evolution of the five primitive vowels out of the corresponding breaths and semi-consonants of the Semitic alphabet and also for the changes in the forms of certain letters.' The epigraphic history of these earlier