Art of Writing Very Old

1910

New Discoveries Carry Back Existence of Written Documents Centuries Beyond Phoenician Record

The revelations made at the remains of a great prehistoric palace at Knossos, in Crete, which is believed to be the original of the fabled "Labyrinth," would seem to carry back the existence of written documents on Greek soil some eight centuries beyond the earliest known monuments of Greek writing and five centuries beyond the earliest dated Phoenician record as seen on the Moabite stone.

These discoveries, therefore, place the whole question of the origin of writing on a new basis. It is thought that the Cretan hieroglyphs exactly correspond with what, in virtue of their names, we must suppose to have been the pictorial originals of the Phoenician letters on which the alphabet is based.

Among these are Aleph, the ox's head; Beth, the house; Daleth, the door, and so forth. This contravenes the old theory of De Rouge that the Phoenician letters were derived from early Egyptian forms signifying quite different objects.