Writing
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Writing

 

We cannot over-emphasize the benefits derived by humanity from the invention of letters to record meanings and figures to record number. The record of all human knowledge is effected by this valuable invention. There is little divergence of views among historian and researchers that Arabic and Latin alphabets are derived from one source, and that Europeans had relied on Canaanites or Arameans in deriving the first letters of their alphabet, which resemble in pronunciation and structure some Semitic Letters, particularly the letters A, B, C, D, which are all known in the Semitic languages.

Most researchers support the possibility that the Canaanite or Aramean letters were gradually taken from Egyptian letters copied from ancient hieroglyphic pictures. They believe that the table which Flanders Betri came across in the Sinai Peninsula in 1906, contains something between the old pictographs and the alphabetical letters published by the Canaanites and the Arameans. They assess the age of this tablet at upward of 3500 years, when the Arameans were living in Sinai Peninsula.

The hieroglyphic pictures in Egypt may have preceded their like in other parts of the world in view of the abundance of papyrus and writing ink in the Nile Valley. But the Europeans did not derive them direct from the Nile Valley as the priests were keen on concealing these secrets... When the letters of the alphabet became in the course of time established and widespread they moved into the vicinity of Egypt, in Sinai and on its Eastern frontiers, where the Arameans and Canaanites had been living.

There is no doubt that the people of the Arabian Peninsula have the credit of inventing that valuable means of publication and propagation, because they exported it to the Asian and European nations. The Indians took their alphabetical letters from Yemen, and the Greeks took theirs from the Arabs in Palestine.

The system of figure-writing came much later than the system of letter-writing. The evaluation of the arithmetical figures dates back to the Semitic people, who developed the Indian `numbers they had derived from the Indians after Islam, and added to it the mark '0' (Zero) and the decimal system. Thence forward these numbers have been known to the Europeans as «Arabic Numerals. The word `ZERO' is a derivation from its original name.

 

 

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