Sublimity

For the Christian culture of the Middle Ages, writing was more than an administrative and economic, archival and memorial medium. It was a sacred means of communicating with the divine, while also giving durability to this communication. Its origins were often attributed to a mythical prehistory, thus enhancing its status. There were Greco-Hellenistic models for this. Herodotus reports that the Ionians adopted letters from the Phoenicians who had immigrated to Greece under the leadership of Cadmus; he also claims to have seen letters from the time of Cadmus in the temple of Apollo Ismenius in Thebes in Boeotia (Histories 5: 58f.). Plato has Socrates recount that the Egyptian god Thoth invented letters, as well as numbers and arithmetic, the arts of measurement and astronomy, board games and dice (Phaedrus 273c). Other Greek authors name the great mythical inventors, artists, and heroes of their culture: Palamedes, Sisyphus, Prometheus, or Orpheus. Pliny presents the widespread view that Cadmus brought writing (a sixteen-letter alphabet) from Phoenicia to Greece, and that Palamedes (or Aristotle) and Simonides added four further letters to it. For the earliest beginnings he juxtaposes the opinion of Anticlides, that the Egyptian Menon invented writing “15,000 years before Phoroneus, the most ancient of the Greek kings,” with that of Epigenes, that “the Babylonians had astronomical observations inscribed on baked bricks going back 720,000 years” (Naturalis historia 7:57). Nonnos poetically describes the introduction of writing by Cadmus: in Egypt, “he pressed out the milk of the holy books ineffable, scratched their scratches across with backfaring hand and traced their rounded circles” (Dionysiaca 4:267– 69).

Isidore of Seville, the early medieval encyclopedist, assembles the different traditions into a not altogether coherent whole: he associates the beginnings of the Hebrew alphabet with Moses, those of the Syriac and Chaldean alphabets with Abraham, and those of the Egyptian letters with the goddess Isis, who found them in Greece and brought them to Egypt (Etymologiae 1.3.5). According to Isidore, the custom of marking capital letters in scarlet (Phoeniceus color) came from the Phoenicians, from whom Cadmus had transmitted the letters to the Greeks.