s. As a system of
notation, it appears to occupy an epoch between the hieroglyphic system
of Egypt and the Greek alphabet. But whatever may be said of its
origin, affinities, changes, or character, it is clear that this simple
alphabet spread westward among the barbaric nations of Europe,
changing, in some measure, in its forms of notation and the articulate
sounds it represented, until it reached the utmost limits of its
western and northern coasts and islands. Here it served as the means of
recording human utterance, until it was supplanted and obliterated by
the civilization of Rome and the Roman alphabet. To decypher the
ancient inscriptions in this simple character, found upon rocks and
monuments, is an object, at this day, of learned research; and its
importance may be judged of by observing, that, whenever successfully
effected, it is a literal restoration, to the present age, of the lost
sounds of those parts of the ancient world. I will no farther allude to
this period, so important in its means of research, than to add, that
the inscription, found in 1838, on opening the gigantic pile of earth,
or tumulus, heretofore referred to, on the alluvial plains of Grave
Creek in Western Virginia, was in one of the types of this ancient
character. This type of the alphabet may be called AONIC[6]--a term
derived from the aboriginal vocabulary. I visited the locality in
1843--carefully examined the facts, and having satisfied myself of the
authenticity of the discovery, took duplicate copies of the inscription
in wax, and transmitted them to Europe. The inscription consists of
twenty-three letters, together with a pictorial device, apparently a
man's head on a pike. It is made on a small hard stone, of an oval
shape, and was found in a vault along with human bones, sea shells, and
various ornaments of a rude age. Professor Charles Rafn, of Copenhagen,
deems the character Celtiberic. I have recently received a memoir from
M. Jomard, at Paris, (the sole survivor of Bonaparte's scientific corps
in Egypt,) who considers it as of Lybian origin, and compares it with
an inscription found on the African shores of the Mediterranean at
Dugga. It relieves, to some extent, the discrepancy existing between
these two learned men to remark that the Dugga inscription consists of
two parts, one of which is pronounced Celtiberic by Hamaker, and that
the generic character of the strokes in this alphabet are preserved to
some extent even in t