Chapter II: Nihil Sub Sole Novi

“There is nothing new under the sun.” “There is no new thing,”
says Solomon, “under the sun.”

We cannot speak of any thing, either of a useful or ornamental character, but we invariably cast our eyes over the ages of the world and trace up, or rather back, to its earliest period, their very origin. There is scarcely an art or a science of which we boast now but owes its existence to the past ages. We have the proofs on their paintings, their mechanics, their arts, and sciences: these are the evidences to prove how far they had advanced in knowledge before the world’s revolutions cast them back again to ignorance and gloom. With the downfall of cities—crumbling away under the fiat of the Almighty, or swallowed up by earthquakes—went the genius of ages; and from their ruins and the debris of classic temples came those traces of high art of which no other living evidences bore witness. The secret went down amid their tottering ruins, and left to after-ages the simple task of imitating their monumental sculptured beauties and fresco painting on the shattered walls of their ruined temples.

Well, then, may we exclaim with Solomon,

“There is no new thing under the sun.”

George R. Gliddon, in his great work of “Ancient Egypt,” speaking of the state of the arts in the earliest ages of Egyptian history, says:—

“Will not the historian deign to notice the prior origin of every art and science in Egypt a thousand years before the Pelasgians studded the isles and capes of the Archipelago with their forts and temples,—long before Etruscan civilization had smiled on Italian skies? And shall not the ethnographer, versed in Egyptian lore, proclaim the fact that the physiological, craniological, capillary, and cuticular distinctions of the human race existed on the distribution of mankind throughout the earth?”

“Philologists, astronomers, chemists, painters, architects, physicians must return to Egypt to learn the origin of language and writing; of the calendar and solar motion; of the art of cutting granite with a _copper_ chisel and giving elasticity to a _copper sword_; of making glass with the variegated hues of the rainbow; of moving single blocks of polished sienite 900 tons in weight for any distance by land and water; of building arches, round and pointed, with masonic precision unsurpassed at the present day, and antecedent, by 2000 years, to the “Cloaca Magna” of Rome; of sculpturing a Doric column 1000 years before the Dorians are known in history; of _fresco_ painting in imperishable colors; and of practical knowledge in anatomy.

“Every craftsman can behold in Egyptian monuments the progress of his art 4000 years ago; and, whether it be a wheelwright building a chariot, a shoemaker drawing his twine, a leather-cutter using the selfsame form of a knife of old as is considered the best form now, a weaver throwing the same hand-shuttle, a whitesmith using that identical form of blowpipe but lately recognized to be the most efficient, the seal-engraver cutting in hieroglyphics such names as Shooph’s above 4300 years ago, or even the poulterer removing the _pip_ from geese, all these and many more astounding evidences of Egyptian priority now require but a glance at the plates of Rosellini.”

Perhaps the post-office, being a more modern invention, the result of man’s progress, and its use essential to his present wants and governmental requirements, claims more originality than many of those inventions which a ruder state of society devised. And yet even here we actually owe to those ages much of the material which makes up our great postal superstructure. We learned from them how messengers, couriers, and the transmitting of letters formed an important part of their social system, and how it ultimately grew into a political one, under kings and emperors, through all subsequent ages.

_PASTORAL LIFE._

“Nothing great, nothing useful, nothing high and ennobling,
nothing worthy of man’s nature, of his lofty origin and
ultimate exalted destiny has ever been accomplished but by
toil; by diligent and well-directed effort, by the busy hand
guided in its effort by the wise, thoughtful, hard-working
brain.”—_Anon._

When God said, “Let there be light: and there was light,” it was not the mere flash of the brightness of heaven over the earth, but a light that was to be as lasting as creation itself.

Every thing that sprung up from the earth in its order and beauty received the spirit of a new life from this holy and divine light. And when man in the image of his Maker stood in the Garden of Eden, there shone around him another light,—an emanation from God himself. Mind—intellect—power!

Man was the pioneer of the science of government. Deity planned it, and, as the crowning work of his creation, said:—

“_Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth._”

As the earth became peopled the wants of man called forth all those energies requisite to sustain life by labor or otherwise; and these brought forth the mind’s attributes combined, and the world became a mirror reflecting Him who created it.

Pastoral life, in the early ages of the world’s history, afforded in itself the means of providing for the wants of man. This led to the cultivation of the soil and the raising of cattle.

Before the flood, Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Jabez was the father of such as dwell in tents and have cattle. Then came trades and professions. These led to art, art to science; and, as their numbers increased, they soon found that their sources from which they derived their subsistence—the spontaneous fruits of the earth and the flesh of wild animals killed in the chase—were insufficient to maintain them. Hence they were obliged to have recourse to other means. Property being established and ascertained, men began to exchange one rude commodity for another. While their wants and desires were confined within narrow bounds, they had no other idea of traffic but that of simple barter. The husbandman exchanged a part of his harvest for the cattle of the shepherd; the hunter gave the prey which he had caught at the chase for the honey and the fruits which his neighbor had gathered in the woods. Thus, commercial intercourse began and extended throughout the community. It reached still farther. It passed in its onward career from city to city, and from kingdom to kingdom, till at last it comprehended and united the remotest regions of the earth.

Then came trades and professions. These led to art, art to science, and science to the highest degree of knowledge the human mind is capable of attaining. Men became great: greatness led to power,—power to rule and govern. The combining of all these elementary steps led to the creation of kings, emperors, and lords. Then followed the division of classes. The phases of human intellect harmonized the whole system of rule, and men acknowledged in time the one great axiom, that “Knowledge is power.”

As language, writing, and writing-materials are all, more or less, connected with any subject identified with the welfare, the interest, and honor of a nation, as well as of mankind, they will not be considered out of place if alluded to here in connection with the subject of this work. First:—

_LANGUAGE._

Blair, in his introduction to his Lectures on Rhetoric, speaking of language, says:—“One of the most distinguished privileges which Providence has conferred upon mankind is the power of communicating their thoughts to one another. Destitute of this power, reason would be a solitary and, in some measure, an unavoidable principle. Speech is the great instrument by which man becomes beneficial to man; and it is to the intercourse and transmission of thought, by means of speech, that we are chiefly indebted for the improvement of thought itself.”

Tooke, in one of his admirable golden sentences, says:—“The first aim of language was to communicate our thoughts; the second, to do it with dispatch.”

“And all the worlde was of one tongue and one language.”—_Bible_, 1551, _Gen._ xi.

Language came into the world along with all things that had life. It was the voice of nature speaking through things animate, giving form and harmony to objects animate as well as inanimate; and all of which, as soon as created, God pronounced good.

Flowers had their language, and there was music in the spheres. Trees murmured through their deep forest-home long before the woodman’s axe stripped them of their mode of expressing their wild æolian sounds to each other. And there was language in waterfalls, mountain cataracts, as well as music in the sound, though expressed in thundertones; and, as the spirit of Deity passed over the earth, all living things found tongue, thought, expression, and the human voice syllabled the words and commands of its Maker. Language, therefore, is a divine institution.

Horace, Pliny, Juvenal, and others, held the opinion that it was a divine institution, and only reached its present state after a long and gradual improvement of the human family.

Many of the ancient philosophers and poets believed that men were originally “a dumb, low herd.”

“Mutum et turpe pecus.”

Lord Monboddo—who, in his work on “the Origin of Language,” labors to prove that man is but a higher species of monkey—thinks that originally the human race had only a few monosyllables, such as, Ha, he, hi, ho, by which, like beasts, they expressed certain emotions. Others, again, assert that the early races were in all things rude and savage, totally ignorant of the arts, unable to communicate with each other, except in the imperfect manner of beasts, and sensible of nothing save hunger, pain, and similar emotions. Cicero, alluding to the human race in primeval ages, says:—

“There was a time when men wandered everywhere through life after the manner of beasts, and supported themselves by eating the food of beasts. Fields and mountains, hills and dales were alike their homes.”

Rousseau represents men as originally without language, as unsocial by nature, and totally ignorant of the ties of society. He does not, however, seek to explain how language arose, being disheartened at the outset by the difficulty of deciding whether language was more necessary for the institution of society, or society for the invention of language.

Language is beyond doubt a divine institution, invented by Deity, and by him made known to the human race. If language was devised by man, the invention would not have been at once matured, but must have been the result of the necessities and experience of successive generations. Adam and Eve, in the garden of Eden, spoke a language the purity of which continued until its final disruption at the building of the Tower of Babel.

What language is more beautiful and expressive than that of the Hebrew? It is the language of Deity, and it pleased our Lord Jesus to make use of it when he spake from heaven unto Paul.

There are said to be no less than 3425 known languages in use in the world, of which 937 are Asiatic, 588 European, 276 African, and 1624 American languages and dialects.

By calculation from the best dictionaries, for each of the following languages there are about 20,000 words in the Spanish, 22,000 in the English, 38,000 in the Latin, 30,000 in the French, 45,000 in the Italian, 50,000 in the Greek, and 80,000 in the German.

In the estimate of the number of words in the English language it includes, of course, not only the radical words, but also derivatives, except the preterites and participles of verbs; to which must be added some few terms which, though set down in the dictionaries, are either obsolete or have never ceased to be considered foreign. Of these about 23,000, or nearly five-eighths, are of Anglo-Saxon origin.

The alphabets of different nations contain the following number of letters:—English, 26; French, 23; Italian, 20; Spanish, 27; German, 26; Sclavonic, 27; Russian, 41; Latin, 22; Hebrew, 22; Greek, 24;[8] Arabic, 28; Persian, 32; Turkish, 33; Sanscrit, 50; Chinese, 214.

Anthony Brewer (1617) thus characterized those best known:—

“The ancient Hebrew, clad with mysteries;
The learned Greek, rich in fit epithets,
Blest in the lovely marriage of pure words;
The Chaldean wise; the Arabian physical;
The Roman eloquent; the Tuscan grave;
The braving Spanish, and the smooth-tong’d
French.”

The Hebrew language and letters are derived from the Phœnician, since Tyre, Sidon, &c. were distinguished cities in the age of Moses and Joshua. Even Abraham lived in their territory.

Sanscrit is the basis of Hindoo learning, and said to be the first character.

The most ancient Arabic, called Kufick, so named from Kufa, on the Euphrates, and is not now in use. The modern Arabic was invented by the Vizier Moluch, A. D. 933, in which he wrote the Koran.

Armenian is used in Armenia, Asia Minor, Syria, Tartary, &c. It approaches the Chaldean or Syriac, and the Greek.

Chaldean, Phœnician, or Syriac, ascribed to Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Moses, is the same as the Hebrew.

The Coptic is an alphabet so called from Coptos in Egypt,—a mixture of Greek and Egyptian.

Ethiopic, or Abyssinian, is derived from the Samaritan, or Phœnician.

The Etruscan was the first alphabet used in Italy, and so called from the Etrusci, the most ancient inhabitants.

Gothic: the most ancient characters under this name are attributed to Bishop Ulphilas.

Cadmus, the Phœnician, introduced the first Greek alphabet into Bœotia, where he settled in B. C. 1500; though Diodorus says the Pelasgian letters were prior to the Cadmean.

The Greeks called the Phœnicians _Pelasgü quasi Pelagi_, because they traversed the ocean and carried on commerce with other nations.

Scaliger supposes the Phœnician to have been the original Hebrew character, otherwise the Samaritan,—which is generally supposed to be that which was used by the Jews from the time of Moses to the Captivity.

The alphabet of the Sanscrit is called the devanagari.

The Oriental alphabets are the Hebrew, ancient and modern; Rabbinical; Samaritan, ancient and modern; Phœnician; Egyptian hieroglyphic; Chinese characters.

The Irish alphabet is the Phœnician.