The symbolism of the alphabet

The Symbolism of the Alphabet

The alphabet is both a puzzle and a mystery. It is the first lesson a child learns, yet it remains the most difficult achievement for mankind to master. The writing systems of some ancient and highly cultured civilizations never progressed beyond the stage of using signs for whole words or syllables. The origin of our letters is obscure, and their meaning is enigmatic. All we know for certain is that the English alphabet comes to us through Latin from the Greek, and that many of the names and forms of the letters were derived from the Phoenicians. Beyond this point, the ancestral tree cannot be traced.

Scholars agree that the earliest written characters were pictorial representations of natural or imaginary objects; Philo Byblius A Phoenician writer of the 1st-2nd century AD even supposed them to be pictures of the gods. Eventually, conventionalized shapes replaced these hieroglyphics. However, the letters retained their sacred and symbolic nature. They were used in religious ceremonies and magical incantations, and were worn as charms to ward off evil influences.

The Semitic aversion to images likely played a major role in replacing pictorial representations with geometric and conventional designs. Schoolcraft Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an American geographer and ethnologist notes that when the French invaded Egypt, they found that the inhabitants had substituted the Arabic alphabet for phonetic hieroglyphics, installing Muhammad's system in their place.

Ancient tradition claims that the art of writing originated in Egypt, but countless attempts to link the forms of our letters to Egyptian hieroglyphics have failed. About fifty years ago, it was thought that M. de Rougé Emmanuel de Rougé, a French Egyptologist had finally succeeded in making this connection. His discoveries were introduced to the English-speaking world in the classic volumes of the Reverend Isaac Taylor and were generally accepted. Some of these derivations are extremely clever and seemed convincing at first. For example, the letter "M" was supposed to represent the horns of the owl Mulak The Egyptian hieroglyph for the "m" sound, which was the hieroglyphic for the syllable Mu. It was thought the peaks of the horns remained after the rest of the bird's body disappeared from the script. However, a close examination of the Papyrus of Ani A famous Egyptian Book of the Dead raised doubts about this. At the beginning of the papyrus, the owl's horns are