PLATE XXI.

SAMARITAN WRITING.

XITH CENTURY.

SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH.

THE general views upon the great family of the languages of the Arabic race, which are detailed in the articles on the Arabic and Hebrew writings, leave only a few remarks necessary to be made on the Samaritan writing.

The Samaritans were, in reality, only a portion of the Israelitish people, and their country a portion of Palestine. Samaria was, indeed, at one period the capital of the kingdom of Israel; and this civil and religious unity produced a corresponding union of language and writing. The Samaritan alphabet, such as is employed in the manuscript copied in the accompanying Plate, was, in fact, from the earliest period, the universal alphabet of the entire Hebrew nation.

Much pains have been taken, but with little success, to determine its origin; we must not, however, omit to observe, that the Samaritan alphabet has been considered as one of the most ancient among all those of the East, and as one preserving the most evident traces of the formation of an alphabetical system of writing. This opinion is founded upon the names which are given to the letters of this alphabet, and which are significative; thus, aleph (A) signifies an ox, beth (B) a house, ghimel (G) a camel, daleth (D) a gate, zain (Z) a dart or a sword, jod (I) a hand, and so forth; and the ingenious author of this observation concludes from these facts, that, in a primitive alphabet, these denominations announce that the figure of the letter had a direct relation with the object designated by its name; for example, that the figure of an ox was in some degree given to the letter A, and that this letter was called aleph from the name of this

quadruped, which commences with the sound A. It is as if in French the figure of a bull were given as the written sign of the sound B, because its name commences with the letter which expresses this sound.

It has been remarked in the article on Hebrew writing, in which the same nomenclature of alphabetical signs is introduced and preserved, that it is on a similar principle, and on this principle alone, the entire phonetic or alphabetical system of Egyptian writing is established. It might therefore be inferred, that the figures of the letters of the Samaritan writing approached, in their primitive period, the forms of the objects which the names of each clearly indicate; and since the actual figures of the Samaritan alphabet, although very ancient, have no longer even a distant resemblance to the objects indicated by the names of these letters, this alphabet has been considered as their second; and that its predecessor, probably entirely figurative, and consequently imitated from the Egyptian, has been lost. It is, in truth, with great difficulty that we can recognise in the aleph (see the second letter commencing at the right hand of the first line of the fac-simile,) the outline of the head of an ox (aleph) with its two horns.

Such is, nevertheless, without doubt, the most ancient alphabet of the Hebrews, which has obtained, in course of time, the name of the Samaritan alphabet. This historical fact reaches back to the period of the schism or separation of the ten tribes, carried captives to Babylon by Nebuchodonosor, in the seventh century B.C.

After the seventy years' sojourn in Assyria, these Israelites returned to their country, bringing with them, however, a new alphabet of Chaldaic origin. (See the article on Hebrew writing.) This new alphabet was used by the ten tribes, and now bears the name of the Hebrew or Hebrew-Chaldæan; whilst the two other tribes who inhabited Samaria, preserved their ancient alphabet, which has retained to the present time

the name of Samaritan*. The religious schism which arose between these two portions of the people of Israel, and which set the temple of Garizim in opposition to the temple of Jerusalem, engendered also another perpetual schism, that which subsequently existed in the graphic system of the two nations, which previously formed only one family.

The Samaritans are essentially distinguished from the Jews in this, that they consider only the five books of Moses, or the Pentateuch, as of divine authority; and the Samaritan text of these books has been valued on account of the antiquity generally accorded to it.

The number and value of the letters are the same both in the Samaritan and Hebrew alphabets, as ought to be the case, since they are used to write two idioms of the same origin, equally belonging to the great Arabic or Semitic stock, and differing only from each other in certain words or phrases.

The fac-simile in the Plate is taken from a fine manuscript + in the Bibliothèque Royale at Paris, containing the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is a thick folio volume, carefully written on

It will be obvious, that this theory, however ingenious, is wholly at variance with the received history of the Jews, as based on Biblical authority, according to which the ten tribes of Israel in Samaria were carried away captives to Babylon by Shalmaneser, about B.C. 721, in the reign of Hoshea (2 Kings xvii.), and the remaining two tribes of Judah were similarly carried away by Nebuchodonosor, B.C. 606, in the reign of Jehoiakim, from which period the seventy years' captivity are to be reckoned (Jer. xxv. 11; xxix. 10). The people still using the Samaritan character, are supposed to be descendants, not of the Jews, but of the nations established in Samaria by Esarhaddon in the place of the ten tribes. (2 Kings xvii. 24; Ezra iv. 2-10).-ED.

This is the manuscript brought by Pietro Della Valle from Damascus, in 1616, from which Joh. Morinus published the text in 1631. It is only by conjecture that it is assigned to the end of the eleventh century, and it would be desirable to have some more certain evidence of its age, since in its writing it corresponds very exactly with the first portion of the Cottonian MS. of the Pentateuch, Claud. B. vIII. which was written at Damascus in the year 764 (A.D. 1362). Another Samaritan MS. in the Bibliothèque du Roi (Peiresc, 2), was considered by Morinus and Kennicott the oldest extant, and assigned by the latter to the tenth century. ED.

vellum, in large massive letters; the phrases being separated by short blank spaces. A note in the manuscript, which merits confidence, states that it was executed at the end of the eleventh century. Few Oriental manuscripts extend back to so early a date*.

PLATES XXII.-XXV.

HEBREW WRITING.

FROM THE XTH TO THE XVTH CENTURY.

VARIOUS FRAGMENTS OF THE HEBREW TEXT OF THE BIBLE.

In the notice on Arabic writing some general observations will be made on the Hebrew language, the language of the original books of the Old Testament, which are the foundation of the Christian faith among modern nations.

It will therefore only be necessary here to consider the system of writing in use among the Hebrews, merely remarking, that numerous proofs of the knowledge and practice of writing occur in the books of Moses, as might be expected; since Moses, brought up in the knowledge of the sciences of the Egyptians, could not be ignorant of the art of fixing the language by signs, as used in Egypt, where this art was generally practised, and served to cover the public monuments and books with written documents, a considerable number of which, anterior even to the time of Moses, still exist; the Egyptian obelisk at Paris, that of Luxor, being contemporary with this illustrious prophet.

Moses was therefore necessarily acquainted with the Egyptian writing, and the elements of its system; he knew,

* This remark is not quite accurate. Very many Syriac MSS. exist written at a much earlier period, and several others might be specified in the Coptic, Arabic, and Armenian languages, anterior to the tenth century. -Ed.

and the monuments themselves teach us, that the system was composed of three species of signs simultaneously employed, namely, figurative, symbolical, and phonetic. Egypt, which had invented writing, or at least a system for her own use, had successively arrived, by the gradual perfection of this system, at these three classes of signs, and their regular combination. But Moses, the lawgiver of a new people, being well convinced of the social utility of the art of writing, and profiting by the knowledge he had acquired from the Egyptians, selected from their entire system its most easy, although most metaphysical portion; and then proceeding on the same principle as all other nations endowed with a moderate degree of culture have done,-the Chinese and some other semicivilized peoples excepted,-he adopted the phonetic system, to the exclusion of the two others, and gave to the Hebrews, (if they did not already possess it,) a purely alphabetical system. It is in this regular system of graphic signs that the books of Moses are written.

The traces of the Egyptian origin of the alphabetical writing of the Hebrews, as an imitative system, are not yet absolutely effaced. The younger Champollion first made this observation in 1822*, and the learned Hebraist, William Geseniust, subsequently, in 1829, extended the application of this remark to all the alphabets called Semitic. This requires only brief explanation.

The words by which the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are designated, have a precise signification; aleph signifying an ox, beth, a house, ghimel, a camel, &c., and these names are very ancient, since they were transmitted by the Phoenicians to the Greeks, when they gave them an alphabet. The first letter of each of the words is therefore precisely the vowel

* Lettre à M. Dacier. Paris, 1822, p. 34, (page 59 of the Précis du Système Hieroglyphique, 1824).

+ Thesaurus linguæ Hebrææ et Chaldææ. Lips., 1829, p. 1.