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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1853 edition. Excerpt:...of the Egyptian system the Greeks probably derived that method. Though many evidences have been already adduced in favour of the Oriental origin of the characters of the Greek alphabet, none are stronger than the fact, that in the earliest known inscriptions, the Greek writing reads from right to left, like the Hebrew, Phoenician, and Egyptian. But this mode of writing was not permanent; and, indeed, the direction of the writing appears to have been at first undetermined; though mostly from right to left, as I have stated. Before it became settled in its final direction, that from left to right, very curious examples of a transition-stage are found, especially on coins, the inscriptions on which run alternately from right to left, and from left to right; a mode which has been termed boustrophedon, because it runs as an ox ploughs a field, up one furrow and down another. The final settlement of the Greek method of writing, in horizontal lines to be read from left to right, was an event by which the direction of the writing of all modern Europe has been governed; though perhaps its adoption by the Greeks was, at last, the result of accident or caprice; one or other of which have, in fact, governed the establishment of the forms of many of our most important moral and social regulations. The Greek system of writing, when once thoroughly emancipated from the trammels of its Eastern vassalage, may be described as the European style, to distinguish it from all Oriental systems; for it is, in fact, itself the immediate parent, in conjunction with the allied Pelasgic alphabet, as modified by the Romans, of all the existing systems of writing in Europe. I have not yet alluded to the antiquity of Greek writing; indeed, the period at which that art became...