Evening star., 1935-12-01
By Rer Collier.
BIC: God, home and daily

~ bread.
"A Such is the solution Of the
n riddle of the alphabet, as II
begins to take form out of the OBJ
scurity Of 5000 years.
This Is the solution, In any event,
arrived at by DR.. George Lamsa,
noted biblical scholar and linguist,
after tracking down the original
meanings of the symbols in the
Mesopotamian desert of their source.
DR.. Lamsa, who has been In Wash
ington consulting with linguistic ex-
perts. believes his discoveries provide
the first valid basis for penetrating
explanation Of the origin of letters
and their progress from the begin
nings to the present.
The child learning the alphabet
by rote. DR.. Lamsa says, Is doing far
more than repeating a series of mean
tngless symbols.
The first three letters constitute
almost an ancient Assyrian prayer.
In the centuries that have intervened
the original meanings have been lost.
Various theories as to the objects
presumably symbolized by the letters
have been advanced, but for the most
part, DR.. Lamsa's Mesopotamian dis
coveries lead him to believe, these are
secondary meanings applied to them
far from the land of their origin
At home in Mesopotamia, his native
land, 1t was still largely by accident
that Dr.. LarnSa stumbled upon the
real meanings, he revealed in an in
terview.
The story of that discovery is a
fascinating one.
Forty miles north Of the ruins Of
Nineveh. in Mesopotamia, are the scat
tered villages of strange tribe-the
Tayari
They are Assyrians, living in the
same sort Of houses, wearing the same
kind OF clothing, eating the same
foods and catching wolves with the
same sort Of traps as did their ances-
tors Of 1000 years ago. Isolated for
almost 80 centuries amidst peoples
of other manners and other faiths,
they have retained with fanatical de-
votion the folkways OF their FORE
fathers.
TN ONLY one direction have they
deviated. They are Christians
belonging to the HISTORIAN branch Of
the church, which Is supposed to have
arisen from the ministrations of st.
Thomas. who journeyed eastward after
the Resurrection. But they have re-
tanned, with Christianity, some of the
elements of their ancestral cult of bull
worship. A Tayari is very respectful
IN the presence of bull. On no con-
sideration will he eat the meat Of the
animal.
This surviving remnant of bull wor-
ship has provided DR.. Lamsa the clue
to the riddle Of the alphabet. DR..
lamsa, who went among the COM
munities of HISTORIAN Christians scat
tered through Persia and Kurdistan
Tor new light on obscure passages of
the New Testament, has vast &C.
cumulation Of material which places
the origin Of letters in a very different
light and provides the connecting links
between such widely diverse alpha
betical systems as ancient Scan
dinavian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek,
English and modern Mongolian.
AS has long been maintained by
linguistic scholars, the letters Of any
alphabet are conventionalized pictures.
Originally writing was merely q series
OF pictures portraying an event.
Eventually certain pictures were used
to symbolic sounds and still further
conventionalized so that they could be
drawn easily and quickly. The trouble
Is that letters have become so con-
ventionalized that it is rather difficult
to say what they originally were in
tended to represent.
But, following the clue Of the sur
v1val Of bull worship. DR.. Lansa soon
found that the Tayari were using In
their daily lives the actual ptototypes
OF the pictures out Of which their let
ters had been formed. These letters
In turn had been less modified from
their original forms than the letters
OF Western alphabets, to which they
clearly were related.
DR.. Lamsa believes that he found
there the original system of letters
the long-sought missing link between
picture writing and syllable writing.
For the first time he was able to put
letter, picture and object together.
He then verified his observations
among other groups of Assyrians and
HISTORIAN Christians in the mountains
Of KurdiStan, on the border of Persia
and Turkey. They, like the Tayari,
ID been the victims Of forced mi
grafton from Syria about the year
200 AID.
His researches not only throw light
on the origin of the alphabet, but give
the letters q new and more profound
symbolic significance. Take, for ex-
anpl', the first letter, "a.
THE Assyrian word for "bull" was
= "alpo." Since the bull was their
divinity, this was also their word for
god" Originally, DR.. Larnsa says,
when the Assyrian wanted to write
about the Deity he drew picture of
q bull. This was slow and cumber-
some-especially as the bull-god was
considered rs having both wings and
horns. To facilitate writing, the fig
ure was conventionalized into a bulls
head-the face reduced to a mere dot
and the horns prominent.
Then some unknown Assyrian-per.