BY JOHN WESTBY-GIBSON, LL. D.

THE ORIGIN OF WRITING.

In the early part of this century, when the old school of thought still dominated the religious world and affected all researches and reasonings in philosophy and literature, it was natural for divines and scholars to see and proclaim the hand of God in the origin of the art of writing. Some declared with Pliny that it was eternal; others, troubled at an inexplicable mystery which they vainly strove to unravel, were fain, as Plato says, "to bring down a God as in a machine to cut the knot." If these divines and scholars believed, as they alleged, that such a copious, well-constructed and grammatical language as the Hebrew of our Sacred Scriptures was the vehicle of the Creative fiat-the language of Elohim and His creatures in Eden-it was but a step further to make writing, whether pictorial or alphabetical, a divine invention and a direct revelation from the beginning to our first parents. Many have been content, however, to lower the epoch of the supernatural gift to the days of Moses, and assert that the later stage of writing, the alphabetical, for transcending in value the pictorial or hieroglyphic, was of divine origin at the time of the vision of the guarded Mount of Sinai. The same reverent sentiment which actuated St. Cyril, Clement of Alexandria, and the early Christian Fathers in alleging that letters were the gift of God, also governed the thoughts of Bryant, Costard, Warburton, Walton, Mitford, and other modern scholars, and it was only an excess of religious fervor which induced so distinguished a divine as Professor Wall, at the time of the discussions on the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, to assert that it was blasphemy to impute to writing a human origin. We must always respect the labors of great and honest men, however erroneous their conclusions may eventually become in the course of ages, and in the light of recent discoveries; but modern thought has long spoken out with a more truthful and certain voice, and the quaint fancies and child-like reasonings of the vanished centuries are now, indeed, "things of the past." The pickaxe and spade of systematic explorers of the buried cities of the East, and the intellectual labors of a glorious though limited band of Egyptologists and Assyriologists, have changed the face of everything; and if any man of sense and thought is still found to believe in the old-fashioned ideas of the origin of language and of writing, he must be one of those credulous creatures who is prepared to accept the dictum of old Johannes Funccius, in his "De Scriptura Veterum," that the patriarch of patriarchs knew shorthand and skillfully practiced the wonderful art in Paradise, and at the same time

*Continued from page 303. Vol. I, No. 9.

determined to see nothing absurd in the Rabbinical Story, that the Divine Alphabet of twenty-two letters was written round the words of the Law on the edges of the Tables of Stone, by "the finger of God" himself, so that Moses thenceforward was enabled to teach Aaron, Joshua and the seventy elders the wonderful art of recording thought and speech in simple phonetics.

We may as well say in this place it is not our object to give an exhaustive account of the origin of writing; but, as the subject has always been of interest to studious minds, we scarcely need to apologise to our readers for delaying our main articles on shorthand-writing proper until we have endeavored to make clear the times of the several inventions of pictorial, phonetic and alphabetic writing, and pointed out the links in the golden chain which binds the past to the present, and recognised the peoples and persons to whom we are the most indebted.

The pillars of Seth are often spoken of by ancient writers, but there is no proof and little likelihood that in the second generation of mankind any form of intelligent writing was in existence. In sixteen centuries before the Deluge, however, such a consummation need not be a matter of incredulity. The appellation of these supposed inscribed memorials should have been "The Pillars of the Sethites." Josephus tells us that the sons of Seth were good and virtuous. They lived happily in the land, and were the inventors of the peculiar wisdom concerned with the heavenly bodies; and that their discoveries might not be lost, upon Adam's prediction of the alternate destruction of the world by fire and water, they made two columns, the one of brick the other of stone, so that one of them might probably remain to exhibit their inscribed records to posterity. He gravely adds, "Now this remains in the land of Siriad to this day," but neglects to indicate the locality. "Siriad" may be a corruption from the "Sippara" of Chaldean tradition, but as the learned Jew apparently drew his story from the works of Manetho, the Egyptian high-priest, some region in the land of Mizraim may have been intended. The pillar known to him may have been some monument of Set Shalti, (Salatis) the first shepherd king (circa 2000 B. C.) or of Seti Ameneptah (close on the Exodus of 1491 B. C.), or of some other Egytian king bearing a name whence the legendary Sethosis, or Sesostris, has been derived.* Ammianus Marcellinus says the pillars of Seth were placed in the caverns called Syringes near Thebes, meaning the chambers of the Labyrinth, but that remarkable monument was not built until the days of Amenemes III, in the 19th century B. C.

There is no doubt that in the transition period between the Memdome and Christian Eras there was a wide-spread tradition of the existence of antidiluvian records. Manetho, in the days of Ptolemy Philadelphus, af

*In folk-lore. the two pillars of Rameses the Great, now in London and New York, might even have been called pillars of Seth.-one of that monarch's names being "Sethos."

firms that he obtained his historical materials for his book Sothis from those pillars which were inscribed in the sacred dialect and in hieroglyphical characters by Thoth, the first Hermes; and Agathodaimon, son (i. e., descendant) of the Second Hermes, translated them into the Greek tongue, and deposited them in the penetralia of the temples. His epistle to the king declares that his own writings were gathered from the books of Hermes Trismegistus, "our fore-father." From the curious genealogical medley, concerning these ancient worthies which the Christian Fathers have handed down to us from Manetho, we can discover, in the first place, a reference to the Sethite, "righteous Enoch," as the antidiluvian Thoth or Tet, the word; the first Hermes, wisdom; and, in the second instance, to the postdiluvian Thoth, or Teta, Thoth-born, the second Hermes, the second of the kings of Egypt at This, the ancient Abydos, son of Mena, the Menes of Horodotus, "the founder of the nation, whom all the ancient historians chronicle as Mizraim, Mestraim or Misor. This second Thoth is also Hermes Trismegistus, thrice-great. The scholar with the Greek name, Agathodaimon, good spirit, is evidently meant for the fourth Egyptian king, Ata, also called Un-nefor, the good being, son of Atet, (Kenkenes), the third king. The names of these four early kings of Egypt are inscribed on the cartouches of of the Great Tablet set up to his seventy-two ancestors and predecessors by Seti Ameneptah I, of the Eighteenth Dynasty, at Abydos, circa 1500 B. C.

Trustworthy or not, a somewhat similar account is found in the Phonician History of Sanchoniathon, preserved to us by Eusebius, and translated into Greek by Philo Byblius but edited in such a manner that we cannot identify what strictly belongs to the original author. The work says, "These things are written in the Cosmography of Taautus and in his memoirs." "From Misor came Taautus, who found out the writing of the first letters whom the Egyptians call Thoor, the Alexandrians Thoyth and the Greeks Hermes." Taaut, afterwards called "Hermes Trismegistus, counsellor and scribe to Cronus" [Ham], father of Misor, is said to have "made symbolical images of the gods, and formed the sacred characters of the other elements,"-whatever kind of writing that may have meant. His reward was to receive from Cronus the gift of all Egypt for his kingdom. The memoirs were taken down by scribes, the Cabiri, mighty-ones, the seven sons of Sydyc, the Just, and "handed to Isiris, who invented three letters, [or three forms of writing], the brother of that Chna, who was the first called Phoenix." Isiris and Chna were evidently Misor and Canaan, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician, here claims Canaan for his ancestor. His history, differing from Manethos, contains no mention whatever of that first Hermes, who is, to all appearance, the prophet Enoch, the subject of numberless legends in Oriental lore.

St. Augustine, Origen, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, St. Jerome, Irenæus,

and other Fathers of the Church, believed in the existence of "the book of Enoch," and continually made quotations from a Greek translation, as if it were canonical. George the Syncellus collected all the fragments known to him, for his "Chronographia." Several copies of the book are said to exist, but their genuineness cannot be vouched. Even if the greatest antiquity were accorded to one of these manuscripts, no one in our day, would venture to impute to the righteous prophet of old the writing of such a book of romantic stories and sensational prophecies. According to Cardinal Mai, some years back, there was a complete copy in the Vatican, and the copy translated from one of Bruce's Ethiopic Mss., and published by Archbishop Laurence, in 1821, has long been known, The Greek copy, quoted by the Fathers, has vanished, however. What satisfies, however, the minds of many divines, that the book existed as a genuine record at the beginning of the Christian Era, is the fact that the Epistle of Jude, admitted into our Sacred Scriptures as authentic, evidently quotes from a book of the kind in giving some particulars of the fallen angels of the old world, and recounting Enoch's prophecy of the judgment to come in the latter days. The Old Testament makes no mention of Enoch's prophecies of the successive destruction by water and by fire, but the New Testament certainly sanctions the reality of the latter prophecy. The former one, whether carried down by tradition, for which only one generation, that of Methuselah, was required, or recorded in writing, may also have been delivered by the righteous patriarch, of whom it is said, "he was not, for God took him." There is no doubt that his remarkable translation, the prediction of the coming flood, (by whomsoever given), the death of Methuselah in the year of the Deluge, and the immediate occurrence of that terrible catastrophe, must have exercised the greatest influence on the minds of Noah and his family, the surviving patriarchs of the New World. The series of supernatural events must have intensified the belief that Enoch was, in some mysterious way, an avatar, an incarnation of the personal word, the Divine Wisdom. To the sons of Ham in Egypt,—the land of Khem, the land of Mizraim, he was the first Thoth, and to him was attributed all knowledge and wisdom, and the discovery of every material aid to the extension of art, science and letters. Naturally in postdiluvian times, their king, Teta, the Athothes or Hermogenes, wisdom-born (according to the gloss of Eratosthenes) was considered a continued Avatar of the Divine Word on Earth, the reviver of learning and author of the social institutions of the country, "the Second Hermes, the thrice-great."

*The traveller, Bruce, brought home three copies from Abyssinia.

(To be continued.)

(SEE FRONTISPIECE.)

Francis Xavier Gabelsberger was born at Munich, February 9, 1789. At the age of 28, (1817) he first constucted his Stenography, but did not put it to practical use until 1819, and then, as he himself says, very insufficiently and imperfectly. Varying and developing his process formed on the basis of the German alphabet, by the year 1829 he was able to exhibit such talent in the practice of it as to obtain a flattering report from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. His efforts were encouraged and assisted on all hands, and he was able to bring out the work which has made him famous as the "Father of German Stenography"-a system almost cosmopolitan in its range, predominating in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Russia, Roumania and Servia, extending into Greece and Italy, and having its enthusiastic advocates in America and England. He died January 4, 1849. His system will be fully treated in THE HISTORY OF SHORTHAND, and we will not stop to consider it here.

Our Frontispiece is a representation of the life-size bronze statue which has lately been unveiled at Munich on the occasion of the meeting of the International Shorthand Congress at that place.

PRIZE COMPETITION.-No. 3.

For the shortest sentence which shall contain the following characters: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z % # $ " ' ( ) abcdefghijklmnopq r s t u v w x y z ? THE NATIONAL STENOGRAHER will give Five Dollars in cash For each of the three next shortest, one year subscription to THE NATIONAL STENOGRAPHER.

This competition will close January 1, 1891, and is open only to subscribers.

C. H. R.—(1) Any number of capital letters may be used. (2) The sentence may be complex or compound. (3) Any one or more of the characters may be used an indefinite number of times.

It should be remembered that should two or more sentences submitted be of same length, the one containing the least repetition of letters or characters will receive the prize.

MISS E. C. G.-One or more sentences will be received from one contributor.