73It is somewhat the "irony of fate" that no accountof the origin of paper has been reliably recorded.Much of the reputed history of the art, or the invention,is only conjectural. The fact is that, howeverremote the time and place of its beginning,paper first became available to the world of lettersin the eighth century. The Arabs, having acquiredthe art of making it from China (through Chineseprisoners, it is said) brought its manufacture intoArabia in the eighth century and, later, carried itinto Europe by way of northern Africa. The comparativelylarge number of Arab manuscripts, preservedfrom the ninth century, is evidence of theextent to which paper was adopted and used fortheir literary, scientific, and religious records.
A History Of The World Marvin Perry
Testimony as to the source of the alphabetic writingis available: "The vast majority of alphabetsare descended from the so-called Phœnician whichis the earliest known, and was in existence near athousand years B. C., although it was probably influencedby the still more ancient syllabary script ofthe Assyrians, Babylonians, and the Sumerians onthe one hand and the Egyptian pictographs on theother."49 "The Phœnicians were certainly usingit" (the alphabet) "with freedom in the ninth centuryB. C. According to the view accepted till recently,the alphabet was borrowed by the Phœnicians fromthe cursive (hieratic) form of the ancient Egyptian106hieroglyphs.... The more recent view is that ofDr. A. J. Evans who argues ingeniously that thealphabet was taken over from Crete by the 'Cherethites'and 'Pelethites' or Philistines, who establishedfor themselves settlements on the coasts of Palestine.From them it passed to the Phœnicians, who weretheir near neighbors, if not their kinsfolk."50 Of thealphabetic writing Professor Sayce says: "The historyof our alphabet is a record of slow stages ofgrowth, through which the idea of sound-writing hasbeen evolved. The first effort to record an event, soas to make it widely known, would naturally be todraw a picture of it. A written word, let us remember,is the picture of a sound." And in the same connection,he says that the ancient Phœnicians (becausethey were the great traders and settlers of the earlyworld) were most in need of a clear, precise, andcommunicable method of writing. The alphabeticwriting was such a method.
The next in point of time among the great librariesof the ancient world was that at Pergamos in AsiaMinor. Eumenes II. (197-159 B. C.) and otherkings of Pergamos established a library in this cityof ancient Mysia in which was stored a vast collectionof manuscript books, approximating 200,000rolls, written on papyrus and parchment. This libraryat Pergamos flourished for a period of onehundred and fifty years, or from its establishment onuntil it was given to Cleopatra by Antony, and transferredby his authority to Alexandria in order toreplace one of the libraries which was said to havebeen destroyed by fire in the wars of Cæsar; and so,thenceforward, became incorporated in the AlexandrianLibrary and shared its fateful history. 2ff7e9595c