Now suppose a busy
people compelled to make this mark every day for a thousand years, and
generally in a hurry, and the cross would soon be made without curving
the lines; it would become X. But before it reached even that simplified
form it had crossed the Atlantic, and appeared in the archaic Ethiopian
sign for tsa, thus, ### . In the archaic Phoenician the sign for ### is
### and ### ; the oldest Greek form is ### or ### and the later Greeks
gave it to the Romans ### , and modified this into ### ; the old Hebrew
gave it as ### and ### ; the Moab stone as ### ; this became in time ###
and ### .
Take the letter a. In the Maya there are three forms given for this
letter. The first is ### ; the third is ### . The first looks very much
like the foot of a lion or tiger; the third is plainly a foot or boot.
If one were required to give hurriedly a rude outline of either of
these, would he not represent it thus, ### ; and can we not conceive
that this could have been in time modified into the Phoenician a, which
was ### ? The hieratic Egyptian a was ### ; the ancient Hebrew, which
was ### or ### ; the ancient Greek was the foot reversed, ### ; the
later Greek became our A.
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