of the eleventh century, hereditary fiefs are frequently termed alodia."-H. Hallam, View of the state of Europe during the Middle Ages, ch. 2, pt. 1, note. See also FOLCLAND.

ALSO IN: J. M. Kemble, Saxons in England, bk. I, ch. II.

ALOMPRA, Aloung P'Houra (1711-1760), founder of the last Burmese dynasty. Ousted the invading Peguans in 1753, and seized the Burmese throne; founded the city of Rangoon. In 1757 conquered Pegu, making himself one of the most powerful of eastern monarchs.-See also BURMA: Early history.

ALONZO, Severo, president of Bolivia, 18961899. See BOLIVIA: 1899.

ALOST, a town in central Belgium, the old capital of East Flanders, thirty miles west of Louvain. Printing was introduced into Belgium in 1475 by Thierry Martens, a native of Alost. In 1914 the scene of military severities and violations of the laws of war by the Germans. See BELGIUM: 1667; WORLD WAR: Miscellaneous auxiliary services: X. Alleged atrocities and violation of international law: a, 11.

ALP, the name given by the Swiss inhabitants of the Alpine valleys to the summer pastures situated on the slopes of the mountains, below the snow line. These mountain pastures, found throughout the Alpine system, have been in use for more than a thousand years; references to their existence in the years 739, 868 and 999 have been noted. In the German-speaking mountain districts these alps are the centers of the pastoral life of the inhabitants. Statistics show that there are 4778 such pastures now in the country, 45% of which are owned jointly or exclusively by the communes, 54% by individuals, and the remaining 1% by the state or a few of the larger monasteries. ALSO IN: J. Ball, Hints and notes, practical and scientific, for travellers in the Alps (art. X and pp. lvii-lxv).

ALP ARSLAN, or Mohammed ben Da'ud (1029-1072), sultan of Khorasan, 1059-1072. Conquered Georgia and Armenia about 1064; in 1071 captured Aleppo and took prisoner the Byzantine emperor Romanus Diogenes; founder of the Seljuk empire of Rum. See TURKEY: 1063-1073. ALPHABET.-Importance of the alphabet.— "To us nothing seems more natural or more easy than to express on paper the sounds of our spoken words by means of those twenty-six simple signs which we call the letters of the Alphabet. The phrase 'as easy as A. B. C.' has actually become a proverbial expression. And yet, if we set aside the still more wonderful invention of speech, the discovery of the Alphabet may fairly be accounted the most difficult as well as the most fruitful of all the past achievements of the human intellect. It has been at once the triumph, the instrument, and the register of the progress of our race. long before the Alphabet had been invented, men had contrived other systems of graphic representation by means of which words could be recorded. The discovery of some rude form of the art of writing was, we may believe, the first permanent step that was taken in the progress towards civilization. Till men could leave behind them a record of acquired knowledge the sum of their acquisitions must have remained almost stationary. Thus only could successive generations be enabled to profit by the labours of those who had gone before, and begin their onward progress from the most advanced point which their predecessors had attained. It is true that at a time when writing was unknown it would be possible for civilization to advance in certain defined directions.

But,

There would, for example, be nothing to prevent a considerable development of artistic skill; the metallurgic, the ceramic, and the textile arts might flourish, and certain forms of poetry-lyric, epic, and dramatic-would not altogether be impossible. All this might easily be the case, but, on the other hand, law would be mainly custom, science could be little more than vague traditions, history would be uncertain legend, while religion must have consisted mainly of rhythmic adorations, and of formulas of magical incantation. The Vedic hymns, the Arval chants, the Rhapsodies of the Kalevala, the metrical maledictions of Accadian priests, the tale of Troy, the legend of Romulus, the traditional folk lore of the Maoris, may give us a measure of the extreme limits which are attainable by the religion, the literature, the history, and the science of unlettered nations. It is more than a mere epigram to affirm that unlettered races must of necessity be illiterate. But not only may a people have a literature without letters, but they may possess the Art of Writing without the knowledge of an Alphabet. Every system of nonalphabetic writing will, however, either be so limited in its power of expression as to be of small practical value, or, on the other hand, it will be so difficult and complicated as to be unsuited for general use. It is only by means of the potent simplicity of the alphabet that the art of writing can be brought within general reach. The familiar instances of Egypt, Assyria, and China are sufficient to prove that without the alphabet any complete system for the graphic representation of speech is an acquirement so arduous as to demand the labour of a lifetime. Under such conditions, science and religion necessarily tend to remain the exclusive property of a sacerdotal caste; any diffused and extended national culture becomes impossible, religion degenerates into magic, the chasm which separates the rulers and the ruled grows greater and more impassable, and the very art of writing, instead of being the most effective of all the means of progress, becomes one of the most powerful of the instruments by which the masses of mankind can be held enslaved. Hence it must be admitted that the really important factor in human progress is not so much the discovery of a method by which words can be recorded, as the invention of some facile graphic device, such as the alphabet, by means of which the art of writing can be so far simplified as to become attainable before the years of adolescence have been passed."-I. Taylor, History of the alphabet, pp. 1-3.

It can

Earliest stages of development.-"The art of writing involves very complex factors. hardly be in doubt that man learned that art by slow and painful stages. The conception of such an analysis of speech-sounds as would make the idea of an alphabet possible must have come as the culminating achievement of a long series of efforts. The precise steps that marked this path of intellectual development can for the most part be known only by inference; yet it is probable that the main chapters of the story may be reproduced with essential accuracy. For the very first chapters of the story we must go back in imagination to the prehistoric period. Even barbaric man feels the need of self-expression, and strives to make his ideas manifest to other men by pictorial signs. The cave-dweller scratched pictures of men and animals on the surface of a reindeer horn or mammoth tusk as mementos of his prowess. The American Indian does essentially the same thing to-day, making pictures that crudely record his successes in war and the chase. The Norther

were striving toward in the sixteenth century A. D., various Oriental nations had attained at least five or six thousand years earlier. In Egypt at the time of the pyramid-builders, and in Babylonia at the same epoch, the people had developed systems of writing that enabled them not merely to present a limited range of ideas pictorially, but to express in full elaboration and with finer shades of meaning all the ideas that pertain to highly cultured existence. The man of that time made records of military achievements, recorded the transactions of every-day business life, and gave expression to his moral and spiritual aspirations in a way strangely comparable to the manner of our own time. He had perfected highly elaborate systems of writing. Of the two ancient systems of writing just referred to as being in vogue at the so-called dawning of history, the more picturesque and suggestive was the hieroglyphic system of the Egyptians. This is a curiously conglomerate system of writing, made up in part of symbols reminiscent of the crudest stages of picture-writing, in part of symbols having the phonetic value of syllables, and in part of true alphabetical letters. In a word, the Egyptian writing represents in itself the elements of the various stages through which the art of writing has developed. We must conceive that new features were from time to time added to it, while the old features, curiously enough, were not given up. Here, for example, in the midst of unintelligible lines and pothooks, are various pictures that are instantly recognizable as representations of hawks, lions, ibises, and the like. It can hardly be questioned that when these pictures were first used calligraphically they were meant to represent the idea of a bird or animal. In other words, the first stage of picture-writing did not go beyond the mere representation of an eagle by the picture of an eagle. But this, obviously, would confine the presentation of ideas within very narrow limits. In due course some inventive genius conceived the thought of syombolizing a picture. To him the outline of an eagle might represent not merely an actual bird, but the thought of strength, of courage, or of swift progress. [See also AZTEC AND MAYA PICTURE WRITING.] Such a use of symDols obviously extends the range of utility of a nascent art of writing. Then in due course some wonderful psychologist-or perhaps the joint efforts of many generations of psychologists-made the astounding discovery that the human voice, which seems to flow on in an unbroken stream of endlessly varied modulations and intonations, may really be analyzed into a comparatively limited number of component sounds-into a few hundreds of syllables. That wonderful idea conceived, it was only a matter of time until it would occur to some other enterprising genius that by selecting an arbitrary symbol to represent each one of these elementary sounds it would be possible to make a written record of the words of human speech which could be reproduced-rephonated-by some one who had never heard the words and did not know in advance what this written record contained. This, of course, is what every child learns to do now in the primer class, but we may feel assured that such an idea never occurred to any human being until the peculiar forms of pictographic writing just referred to had been practised for many centuries. Yet, as we have said, some genius of prehistoric Egypt conceived the idea and put it into practical execution, and the hierogly, phic writing of which the Egyptians were in full possession at the very beginning of what we term the historical period made use of this phonetic system along with the ideographic system already

described."-H. S. Williams, History of the Alphabet (Harper's Magazine, v. 108, pp. 534-535). Deciphering the hieroglyphs.-"Of all the splendid achievements of archæological research during the present century, there are none of more universal interest and importance than those which are revealing the origin and history of letters. . . At the beginning of the present [19] century the great mass of testimony now laid open before us was an apparently impenetrable mystery. Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform inscriptions yet remained, for the most part, but confusion of ornament and meaningless signs. Some little advance, it is true, had been reached during the latter part of the eighteenth century, as to the signification of certain hieroglyphic characters, but these were as yet but conjecture; a groping in the dark, with no means to verify, uncertain, unassured. [See also CUNEIFORM WRITING.] With the opening of the present century two events occurred which were to place in the hands of scholars the keys to these mysteries. The first in date of these discoveries, through not in results, was the finding of the Rosetta Stone in 1799. This was an outcome of the French scientific expedition to Egypt under the first Napoleon. At this date, a French artillery officer, named Boussard, while digging among some ruins at Fort St. Julian, near Rosetta, discovered a large stone, of black basalt, covered with inscriptions. This tablet, now known as 'The Rosetta Stone,' was of irregular shape, portions having been broken from the top and sides. The inscriptions were in three kinds of writing; the upper text in hieroglyphic characters, the second in a later form of Egyptian writing, called enchorial or demotic, and the third was in Greek. No one of these had been entirely preserved. Of the hieroglyphic text, a considerable portion was lacking; perhaps thirteen or fourteen lines at the beginning. From the demotic, the ends of about half the lines were lost, while the Greek text was nearly perfect, with the exception of a few words at the end. The immediate inferences were that these three inscriptions were but different forms of the same decree, and that in the Greek would be found some clew for the decipherment of the others. It was first presented to the French Institute at Cairo where it was destined not long to reinain. The surrender of Alexandria to the British, in 1801, placed the Rosetta Stone, by the terms of the treaty, in the hands of the British commissioner. This gentleman, himself a zealous scholar and keenly alive to the importance of the treasure, at once dispatched it to England, where it was presented by George III to the British Museum. A fac-simile of the inscriptions was made in 1802, by the Society of Antiquaries, of London, and copies were soon distributed among the scholars of Europe. When the Greek inscription was read, it was found to be a decree by the priests of Memphis in honor of King Ptolemy Epiphanes, B. C. 198: That, in acknowledgment of many and great benefits conferred upon them by this king, they had ordered this decree should be engraved upon a tablet of hard stone in hieroglyphic, enchorial and Greek characters; the first, the writing sacred to the priests; the second, the language or script of the people, and the third that of the Greeks, their rulers. Also, that this decree, so engraved, should be set up in the temples of the first, second and third orders, near the image of the ever living King. It might be supposed that with this clew the work of decipherment would be readily accomplished. On the contrary, many of the most distinguished scholars of Europe tried, during the

ALPHABET

In

twenty following years, without success. The chief obstacle in the way was the prevailing opinion that the pictorial forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs were mainly ideographic symbols of things. consequence, the absurd conceptions read into these characters, led all who attempted the decipherment of these far away from the truth. It is true that Zoëga, a Danish archæologist, and Thomas Young, an English scholar, each independently, about 1787, had made the discovery that the hieroglyphs in the ovals represented royal names, and were perhaps alphabetic; but the, signification of these characters were never fully comprehended by either of these great scholars. The claim made by the friends of Mr. Young as the first discoverer of the true methods of decipherment, rests upon the fact that he gave the true phonetic values to five of these characters in the spelling of the names of certain royal personages, and in 1819 published an article announcing this discovery. He seems, however, to have had so little confidence in this conception that he went no farther with it, and still later, in 1823, lost the prestige he might have gained, by the publication as his belief, that the Egyptians never made use of signs to express sound until the time of the Roman and Greek invasions of Egypt. The real work of decipherment was reserved for Champollion, who, born at Grenoble, in 1790, was but nine years old when the famous stone was discovered which later on was to yield to him the long lost language of the hieroglyphs. Among the characters on the Rosetta Stone, in the hieroglyphic text, were to be found certain pictorial forms enclosed in an oval. It had hitherto been suggested that these ovals contained characters signifying royal names. Were these symbolic signs, or how were they to be interpreted? Champollion concluded that some of these signs expressed sound and were alphabetic in character. Thus, if the signs in the cartouche supposed to signify Ptolemy, could be found to be identical, letter for letter, with the Ptolemaios of the Greek inscription, an important proof would be obtained. It so happened that on an obelisk found at Phile there was a hieroglyphic inscription, which, according to a Greek text on the same shaft should be that of Cleopatra. If, then, the signs for P, t and in Ptolemaios corresponded with the signs for p, t and in Cleopatra, the identity of these as alphabetic signs would be confirmed. The comparison fully justified his theory, and further confirmation was supplied by further comparisons, until he finally came into possession of hieroglyphic signs for all the consonants."-F. D. Jermain, In the path of the alphabet, pp. 9-14.

ALPHABET

was readily accepted in general. Further, De Rouge's theory of the derivation of the Phoenician from the Egyptian hieratic writing of the xiith dynasty was plausible enough to content most enquirers, though only two out of twenty-two letters were satisfactorily accounted for. In 1883 Isaac Taylor could safely claim that he had 'summarised and criticised all previous discoveries and researches as to the origin and development of alphabets' by his general outline in his work on The Alphabet; in that book a sound general basis seemed to have been reached, and only minor questions needed further discussion and adjustment. Yet the voice of caution was heard even then. Dr. Peile, in 1885, when judicially reporting on Isaac Taylor's work, and while agreeing that 'his book deserves to be, and doubtless will be, the standard book in England on the history of the alphabet,' yet saw that other solutions might arise. He added: 'But no proof of the affiliation of the Phoenician alphabet can be complete without evidence from writing to fill up the long gap between the period of the Papyrus Prisse and that of the Baal Lebanon and Moabite inscriptions. In default of this it must always be possible that the Phoenician alphabet is descended from some utterly lost, non-Egyptian system of writing, traces of which may some day turn up as unexpectedly as the so-called Hittite hieroglyphs.' Within a generation later this possibility clearly appears to be the forecase of the real history."-W. M. Flinders Petrie, Formation of the alphabet, pp. 1-2.

"The investigation of the origin of our alphabet, always a subject of great interest, has been stimulated in recent years by the discovery of writing in Crete, and by the claim of Sir Arthur Evans that this Aegean writing was the source of the socalled Phoenician alphabet. In the midst of the present writer's work on the subject, in all too brief intervals snatched from other pressing duties, the trend of his own results has meantime received unexpected confirmation from the remarkable es say of Dr. Alan H. Gardiner revealing the existence of a hitherto unknown script of Egyptian origin in Sinai, which may have been a form of the Proto-Semitic script, posited by Praetorius as the probable ancestor of both the Phoenician and South Semitic alphabets. At the same time the thoughtful remarks of Schaefer, in a discussion of the reasons for the vowelless character of the Phoenician alphabet, have likewise lent further support to the author's conviction that the old and now widely rejected hypothesis of an Egyptian origin of the alphabet commonly called Phoenician must be carefully re-examined. One of the neglected aspects of the entire problem has been its connection with the related question of the physical process and material equipment of writing in the Near East. This subject has bearing. and important bearing, on the whole question of the influence of any given system of writing in the eastern Mediterranean. . . . An examination of the civilizations of the Near East shows clearly that (excluding monumental documents) there were two physical processes of writing in the eastern Mediterranean world. One, which grew up the Nile, consisted in applying a colored fluid to a vegetable membrane; the other, which arose in the Tigris-Euphrates world, incised or impressed its signs on a yielding or plastic surface which later hardened. Both of these methods reached the classical world: in the wax tablet for the Greek or Roman gentleman's memoranda, and in the pen. ink, and paper (papyrus) which have descended to our own day. The early geographical line to

Theories of origin and development.-"At first sight the diversity of alphabets seems as little connected as the diversity of languages. But as the labours of the philologist have gradually traced the various relations of the better-known languages one to the other, so likewise the epigraphist has Idealt with the varieties of the Greek and Roman alphabets which are the more familiar, while the archæologist has yet to trace and connect the alphabets of the less-known races, many of which were used for languages which are still unread. The more obvious questions of the origins and connections of the better-known alphabets of various countries seemed to have been fairly settled and put to rest a generation ago; the more remote alphabets and the more ancient signary had not then been brought to light to complicate the subject. The old traditional view of the derivation of the western alphabets from the Phoenician fitted well enough to most of the facts then known, and

ALPHABET

be drawn between these two methods of writing may be indicated in the shortest terms by saying that the practice of incision on a plastic surface was Asiatic; the process employing pen, ink, and vegetable paper was Egyptian. . . . If anyone has a lingering doubt about the Egyptian character of the writing equipment of these Aramean scribes in the Assyrian reliefs, such doubt will I am sure disappear on examination of a relief of the Aramean king of Samal, discovered at Senjirli by von Luschan. . . . The king is seated on his throne at the left, while before him stands his secretary, with an object under his left arm, which looks surprisingly like a book, but as this is impossible it may perhaps be a roll partly unrolled. In his left hand, however, he carries an unmistakable Egyptian writing outfit. . . . This Egyptian writing outfit, carried by the Aramean secretary of Samal, of course contained reed pens with a soft brush point like those we have found in Egypt. If this official were to begin taking down his lord's dictation, he would spread his papyrus paper on his left hand, as we have seen the Egyptian scribe doing, and after him the Aramean scribes on the Assyrian reliefs. The pen would make the same broad strokes produced by the Egyptian scribe, and to settle the matter once for all it is important to notice at this point that the Aramaic ostraca found at Samaria, perhaps reaching back into the ninth century B. C., clearly show that the soft-pointed Egyptian brush pen was employed in writing them. Finally we know exactly how these Aramean documents of Western Asia looked, since we have been able to hold in our hands the Elephantine papyri. The system of writing which employed pen, ink, and paper was the only one which possessed an alphabet, and which wrote that alphabet without vowels. It is evident that the pen-ink-and-paper method of writing came from Egypt into Asia and spread there at the very time when the alphabet also was appearing and coming into common use in the same region. It follows therefore that the Egyptian system of writing was in most intimate contact with the whole scribal situation in Western Asia, and it is highly unlikely that we can entirely dissociate the physical process and material equipment contributed by Egypt to Asia at this time from the alphabet which Asia likewise gained at the same time."-J. H. Breasted, Physical processes of writing in the early Orient and their relation to the origin of the alphabet (American Journal of Semitic Languages, July, 1916, pp. 230248). See also EGEAN CIVILIZATION: Minoan age: B. C. 1200-750.

"The vexed question of the origin of our alphabet has given rise to a long series of controversies and theories, but of recent years the matter appears to have been comfortably settled among philologists. A recent discovery of great importance has caused us, however, to reconsider our ideas and to push back farther into the mists of antiquity. It is, of course, a matter of common knowledge that our English alphabet is taken directly from that of the ancient Greeks, who in their turn received it from the Phoenicians. It is indeed true that not later than 1,000 years before the Christian era a perfect alphabet of twenty-two consonants, but without vowels, was used upon Phoenician soil, and it is clear that Greece adopted most of the letters of this script, although possibly in an earlier stage of development than that in which we first encounter it. Some of the Greek letters, however, seem to have a closer affinity with those of another Semitic alphabet, akin to Phoenician, but used in slightly varying forms in South Arabia and Abyssinia, and generally known

ALPHABET

as South Semitic, the North Semitic being Phonician proper. The mutual relations of the North

All

and South alphabets seem to postulate a common parent which came into existence at least anterior to 1000 B. C., and which may be called Original Semitic. Opinions differ considerably as to the origin of this hypothetical script, and a cluster of divergent theories ascribe its origin respectively to Babylonian cuneiform, Egyptian hieratic, the lately discovered Cretan, and finally a number of marks and other symbols found on Egyptian pottery, but certainly not Egyptian in origin. these derivations present difficulties, and a different solution of the problem has been presented by Dr. Alan H. Gardiner, who has studied the subject exhaustively and whose researches have already been propounded by Mr. T. E. Peet. Our data are the early forms of the letters, and their names, which can be shown with great probability to be as old as the letters themselves. The signs were originally chosen on the acrophonic principle; thus, in order to represent the sound B, a common object, whose name began with B-namely, BET, 'a house'-was chosen. The sign was hence called BET, which has survived in the Greek BETA. Can we see this process in its early stages? In the peninsula of Sinai, on a plateau called Serâbît-el-Khâdim, anciently frequented by the Egyptians for the purpose of turquoise-mining, stood a temple dedicated to the goddess Hathor, really called 'the Lady of the Turquoise.' In this temple the expedition sent by the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1905 discovered various monuments bearing inscriptions in an unknown script, and near the turquoise mines in the same district were found seven further inscriptions in the same writing. Careful copies were made of these documents, but it was not until 1914 that their true significance was realized, when Dr. Alan H. Gardiner, submitted them to a long and minute study. It soon became manifest to Dr. Gardiner that, though the language was not Egyptian, many of the characters were taken from Egyptian hieroglyphs, but this borrowing was confined merely to the forms of the sign and not to their Egyptian values. As Semites are known from other evidence to have accompanied the Egyptian expeditions to Sinai, Dr. Gardiner argued that the new script might well be Semitic, and he proceeded to fix the values of the signs on the acrophonic principle already alluded to. These signs being only thirty-two in number could scarcely be other than alphabetic. Having thus determined the values of fifteen signs, with their help a group of four signs which recurs in several of the texts was found to read BA'ALAT -the Semitic word for Lady, or Goddess-the evident equivalent of the Hathor of the purely Egyptian inscriptions of this site. Dr. Gardiner and other scholars have added new readings for other groups of signs, but none of these are quite as convincing as the instance just quoted. Here, then, in Sinai, we have at a date probably earlier than 1500 B. C. a Semitic people apparently in the very act of borrowing signs from the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, in order to form on the acrophonic principle a true alphabet which would suffice to write their own speech. For B they borrowed the Egyptian sign for 'house' because their own word BET began with the b-sound, and so on. From the very crude alphabet which these inscriptions reveal, it is possible to trace many of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and thus to show that they are conventionalized forms of objects selected originally from the Egyptian hieroglyphs on the acrophonic principle. If we h not here the actual origin of the Phoeniciar