Note 5 — PART I WRITING ILLUMINATING CHAPTER I THE DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING

“The alphabet which we use at the present day has been traced back, in all its essential forms, to the ancient hieratic writing of Egypt of about the twenty-fifth century before Christ. It is directly derived from the Roman alphabet; the Roman, from a local form of the Greek; the Greek, from the Phœnician; the Phœnician, from the Egyptian hieratic. . . . We may without exaggeration . . . carry back the invention of Egyptian writing to six or seven thousand years before Christ.”—Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, “Greek and Latin Palæography,” pp. 1–2.