Palæography : notes upon the history of writing and the medieval art of illumination / By Bernard Quaritch.

  • Quaritch, Bernard, 1819-1899.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Palæography : notes upon the history of writing and the medieval art of illumination / By Bernard Quaritch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    23/156 (page 13)
    and China. Abyssinia and Armenia are included because into the one country Egyptian and Himyaritic characters had been imported, and into the other a form of Babylonian. China is placed in the list, far below her pretensions, because we do not really know the age of the character in which Chinese books preserve the inscriptions of Yu. It appears derivable from the dissertations of M. Terrien, whose saga- cious learning has attracted many scholars, that the earliest history recorded in Chinese annals is not geographically Chinese ; but that it represents the legends and traditions which were carried into China by the ancestors of the race. A connexion has been found to subsist between those traditions and the early history of Babylonia, which leads to the inference that the Akkadian people of 3800 b.c. and the ancestors of the Chinese were at one time united. Assuming that the theory is justifiable, we may treat the Chinese in China as having inherited the art' of writing, however strangely altered in form. It is probably true that they used the letters out of which their present characters descended, in the country they now inhabit, at more than 1000 B.c. The Alphabet in European Greece, 800 B.C. The European Greeks are not included in the preceding paragraph, simply because there are no means of proving that they had the use of letters in the tenth century b.c. The probability, however, is that they were not far behind their brethren in Asia Minor. The variations in the forms of some of the letters of the Greek alphabet which are found in inscriptions at different places both in Asia Minor and in Greece, are attributable to local fashions and to the fact that the script was not built up all at once from a single model. It is here that the tradition about Cadmus has its chief significance ; for there can be little doubt that the alphabet of Tyre, not quite identical with its elder Aramaic