The Origin of Writing by G. W. A.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 18, 1871

The Origin of Writing.

By G. W. A.

In the Printer for February, 1864, there appeared an able article on the “Origin of Printing.” In it the writer makes use of the following language, which is interesting, to say the least. G. W. A.

According to the chronology of Archbishop Usher, which, as it is that attached by authority to the English Bible, may be esteemed the standard system of this country, Babylon was founded by Belus, whom the learned have identified as the Nimrod of Scripture, about 2,232 years before Christ; and the tower of Babel was built by his successors about sixteen years after the founding of the city. Many authors have ascribed the origin of alphabetic writing to the Chaldeans; some have given to the Phoenicians the honor of the invention. Herodotus, Pliny, Plutarch, and others, signify that Cadmus, a Phoenician, settled in Boeotia about 1,500 years before Christ, where he built the city of Thebes; and that he was the first who taught the Greeks the use of alphabetic symbols. Here, perhaps, it may be well to suggest that Cadmus was cotemporary with Moses; and the time of his migration into Greece, making a little allowance for the discrepancies of chronologers, corresponds, as near as need be, with the time when the Israelites came into the possession of the promised land. Now Moses, we are fully assured, had been qualified to write the commandments of God at Sinai; and it is but reasonable to suppose that an art so valuable as writing would, when once learned, rapidly circulate among the most learned of the Hebrews. The inference, therefore, from these premises, is, that before he left Asia, Cadmus had, by an intercourse with some of the Hebrew people, learned the use of letters; and when he emigrated to Greece, he carried the art with him, in which country it was unknown until he taught it.

Maurice on this subject, says: “I cannot, however, avoid owning myself very much inclined to join in opinion with Mr. Bryant, and other genuine sons of science, not infected with the French skeptical philosophy, that so divine an art could not have its origin in the unassisted powers of the human mind.” And the same author, after having adverted to a number of arguments relative to the first application of letters to the purposes of human correspondence, concludes his dissertation with the following energetic language: “In this state of uncertainty the mode of conduct for us to pursue, at once the most consistent with reason, the most conformable to true science, and the most agreeable to sound religion, is to conclude that though some sort of characters, as before observed, formed by the ingenuity of man, or founded upon the basis of the ancient hieroglyphic system, was occasionally used in the early ages of the world, that so divine an art—an art apparently so far surpassing human powers to invent, as alphabetic writing, in the perfection in which it has descended down to us from an Asiatic source, through the medium of the Greeks and Romans—could have its origin in inspiration only, and was at first revealed to man amid the awful promulgations at Horeb; amid the thunders that shook the basis of Mount Sinai!”