Mehdi Kakai
Quotation of the Khouri alphabet by the Phoenicians
In the previous episode, it was said that the ancestors of the Khouri Kurds (XÛRÎ or HÛRÎ) invented letters around 1500 BC, which was the first invention of letters in human history. Therefore, the Khouri alphabet formed the basic basis for the creation and emergence of other alphabets.
500 years after the Khouris invented the alphabet, i.e. in the year (1000) BC, the ancestors of the Phoenician Kurds quoted the cursive letters and made some changes and modifications to them, where they reduced the cursive letters from (30) letters to (22) consonants.
The spread of the Khouri alphabet by the Phoenicians
The Phoenicians were skilled navigators and merchants. Driven by adventure, exploration, curiosity, trade and profit, they were able to expand their knowledge by traveling and navigating the ancient world to satisfy their curiosity, to market and barter their goods, and to search for certain products, especially raw materials for their handicrafts. By traveling to Greece, they transferred the curate alphabet there.
As a result of the Phoenicians transferring the Khouri letters to Greece and quoting them by the Greeks, the Phoenician alphabet was universally called the Khouri alphabet. Therefore, historians and researchers to this day use the term Phoenician alphabet instead of the Khouri alphabet incorrectly. In his world historical encyclopedia entitled (Bibliotheca Historica), which he composed during thirty years (from 60 to 30 BC), the Greek historian (Diodorus Siculus), who lived in the first century BC, quotes references on the Greek island of Crete that The alphabet known as the Phoenician alphabet was not invented by the Phoenicians, but they only introduced it to Greece, where it was associated with their name and was known as the Phoenician letters.
When the Greeks quoted the Khouri alphabet that the Phoenicians had passed on to them, they made it appropriate for their language, adding seven vowels (vowels) to the letters that the Phoenicians passed on to meet the Greek pronunciation. On the island of Santorini, i.e. the ancient island of Thera, the oldest writings of the Greek alphabet were found, which are almost no different from the form of the Phoenician letters (Khuriyya).
The spread of the Khouri alphabet is largely due to (Cadmus) and its name in Greek is (Kάδμος) and in English (Cadmus). In Greek mythology, Cadmus was the son of (Aignor) the Phoenician king of Sidon and the brother of both (Phoenician), (Celix) and (Europe). His sister (Europe) was kidnapped by the chief of the Greek gods, the god (Zeus), as he appeared to her in the form of a white bull and kidnapped her to his kingdom and then married her there. In her honor, the god (Zeus) gave her name to the land to the west of Greece, hence the name of the continent (Europe).
Cadmus traveled to Greece to search for his kidnapped sister (Europe). After he reached Beautié, he established the city of Kadima in the north of Athens, and there he taught the people the Khouri alphabet, after the Greeks lost the ability to use writing with the disappearance of the ancient civilization in the early twelfth century BC.
(Herodotus) mentions that the Phoenicians who came with (Cadmus) brought to the Greeks many knowledge, including letters that they did not know. The ancients used it at first in its familiar initial form and with the passage of time they made some changes to it and also changed in their tongue, and at that time most of the Greeks who surrounded the Phoenicians were from the Ionians, so they learned letters from them and used them slightly distorted, but they continued to call it the Phoenician writing .
The French novelist and critic Anatole France in his book (The Garden of Epicurus) says that Cadmus gave Greece and the world the most valuable gift, i.e. the twenty-two letters that make up the Phoenician alphabet, from which the Greek and Roman writings were derived from which all European writings emerged. [2]. It was also quoted by all Semitic writings (Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic), as well as Central Asian alphabets such as the Zand and Pahlavi alphabets, and even the Indian alphabet, from which the Devignari was born, and all the letters of South Asia .
A bronze coin was found dating back to the era of the Roman Emperor (Flavius Claudius Julianus) (the year 361 - 363 AD). This coin bears on one side an image of Cadmus teaching the good people the Phoenician alphabet. This coin is currently kept in the National Library in Paris.
In about the year 900 AD, the (Etruscans) appeared in Italy and they transferred this alphabet to the Romans, who made some modifications to it to suit the Roman language, which became the current Latin alphabet, as the Latin peoples were satisfied with five speaking letters (vowels) in their alphabet, which was their language need it.
The Latin alphabet spread in all Western writings after it was adopted by the Romans, after which the Europeans began to use it on a large scale in the world. This alphabet continued to be used with some modification, and then both (St. Cyril) and (St. Methodius) benefited from the Roman letters and laid the foundations of Slavic writing in the ninth century AD.
Political conditions played a key role in the rapid spread of the Khouri alphabet. When Alexander of Macedonia appeared in the second half of the fourth century BC, his conquest of many kingdoms helped spread the Khouri alphabet. Then the Romans borrowed many cultural elements from Greece, especially the alphabet. When the rule of Rome prevailed in the West and the East, the use of Latin script increased and it became possible to create a family of the Latin alphabet. When the barbarians attacked the Roman state between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, they benefited greatly from the Roman civilization, and they civilized and inhabited Europe, using the Latin letters to write their different languages. Thus, after its development, the Khouri alphabet became the original, the alphabet of a large part of the population of Africa and the entire continent of Europe.
About four generations after the advent of Christianity, it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The spread of the Christian religion helped spread the Greek writing in many countries in the East and Latin writing in the West. The Greek and Latin script, derived from the Khouri alphabet, extended their influence beyond the borders of the Byzantine and Roman Empires. Since then, the horizons of Latin writing have gradually expanded, especially by deriving some languages from it and creating the Latin language family, and then using its letters to write other languages in different countries. Nowadays, romanization has become the most common in the world.
Thus, through their maritime trade, the Phoenicians spread the Khouri alphabet to North Kurdistan, North Africa and Europe, where it was adopted by the Greeks who developed it to suit their language and from whom it was transmitted to the Romans and then spread throughout Europe.
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Translation: The Geostrategic Network for Studies team
