Evening star., 1935-12-01
A, B and c, Symbols of God, Home
and Daily Bread of Mesopotamians
of 5000 Years Ago, Uncovered by
Research of DR.. George Lamsa.

his idea-thought Of making certain
pictures sound symbols. DR.. Lamsa
is confident that the alphabet was not
a gradual evolution out of picture
writing, but the work of one or two
men. Naturally, the first place was
given to the first syllable Of the divine
word, the name of the Deity. That is
why A is the first letter Of the alpha
bet. It stands for bull" as has been
deduced before from other lines Of
evidence. But in the mind Of the
originator it stood for God" The
letter, as it has come from the As
syrian through the Greek and Latin
into English, still in a convention
allied picture Of bulls horns. some
how or other turned upside down in
the long journey.
The Assyrian word for house was
beta" The Tayari word, and also
the word in the very similar Aramaic
House." or home" was the second
most sacred object in the life Of the
ancient Assyrian. He made its initial
sound the second symbol in his alpha
bet, represented by picture Of a
house. The Assyrian, Of course, drew
the kind of house with which he was
familiar. It was square, fiat-roofed
mud hut, open on one side.
In Just this kind Of houses the
Tayari are living today. Their letter
B is unmistakably a crude represent
alton of the homes which shelter
them. Here, again. the picture under
went profound notifications as 1t
passed through Greek and Roman
into the English. The Greeks. for ex-
ample, lived in two-story houses. The
picture of q fiat hut meant nothing
to them. They added a second story
to make the Greek beta, which has
been only slightly modified into the
English B.
The third most sacred object in the
Assyrian daily life-and in the daily
life of the present-day Tayari-was
the camel. Upon it they depended for
transportation, food and clothing.
Life would have been impossible with
out it. So they made the picture Of
a camel their third htter-Gamel
But, as In the case Of the bull, the
picture of q camel was rather difficult
to draw In a hurry and hence not
well adapted to the purposes Of writ
ing. They conventionalized it to the
outstanding feature Of the aninal-its
hump. The Greeks, who didn't know
much about camels, modified it into
their letter gamma" It appears in
English as G-nothing more than the
picture of the hump ON camel's back.
GO WITH the fourth letter D. It
was intended to be the conven-
tionalized picture of a grove-delta.
Groves were sacred spots to the As
syrians. They are sacred spots to the
Tayari of today. The original delta
was an inclosure with a dot, repre-
senting tree, in the center. Such
places usually were found at the
mouths Of streams-hence the Eng
lish word delta"
In the same way it is possible to 60
through almost the entire alphabet.
Every letter can be traced back to the
Assyrian, to the Tayari, and to OBJ
jects in common use among these
people today. The alphabet Is the
Tayari child's nursery book.
Take L for instance. It was orig
inally "lameth," a jawbone. The
desert is strewn with jawbones Of
animals. Piles Of them constitute
prominent parts of the scenery. An
other is H-originally "hawta." It
is a conventionalized picture Of a
snare trap. It doesn't look much like
trap known to modern Americans,
but it is very fair representation Of
the trap used to this day by the
Tayari to catch wolves. M is men,"
or water. The letter is the picture of
a wave. N is "narga," an AK. The
letter is picture Of an ax-head. 8
Is supposed to represent the man in
the moon. The letter Is "semkat,"
meaning moon"
Dr.. Lamsa's own speciality Is
Aramaic. This was the dialect in
which Jesus preached and was quite
different from the classical Hebrew of
the priests and the court. It was the
language Of the peasantry, which had
been preserved. with very little change,
from the tongue spoken in Palestine
for 1000 years. 1t was a homely Ian
guage, close to home and field. The
figures Of speech used by Jesus were
Aranaic idioms. Failure to under
stand them as idioms, DR.. Lamsa
claims, has led to much n1isunder-
standing.
He illustrates what he means by
personal experience. When he first
came to the United States he became
interested in base ball and an admirer
Of Babe Ruth. One day he picked up
q newspaper to read that his hero
had "died on third base" "I actually
cried about It," he says. He couldn't
understand why the fact hadn't been
emphasized more, but In his mind
there was no doubt that the great
Bambino actually was dead.
Yet his mistake, he says, was no
more absurd than some incorporated
in the Greek translations Of the
Scriptures through failure to UNDER
stand the idioms-the slang of the
peasantry-which are interviewer in
the very structure of the Aramaic
language. Now the Tayari tongue
differs very little indeed from the
Aramaic. These humble tribesmen-