Education: Letters from Heaven

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Ever since Plato, scholars have been baffled by a seemingly closed mystery: Where did the alphabet come from? The Greeks thought that the Phoenicians had learned it in Egypt and that "because they navigated the sea, brought it to Greece." Nineteenth-century scholars, in pensive afterthought, decided that the Semites developed the alphabet from certain cursive characters that the Egyptians had evolved from their own hieroglyphs. Later, other scholars began to discover certain signs that predated hieroglyphs —a series of trademarks, potters' signs, pawnbrokers' labels, and masons' marks that may have spread from trader to trader all over the ancient world. These, they reasoned, may have provided the beginnings of the alphabet.

None of these theories satisfies Dr. Hugh A. Moran, retired Presbyterian minister, and Rhodes scholar with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. While studying Chinese 45 years ago, he became fascinated by the discovery that some basic Chinese characters have their origin in the signs of the solar zodiac. In spite of the press of more urgent business—he was an official of the Y.M.C.A. in China, director of prisoner relief in Siberia during World War I, pastor at Cornell University until 1942—Dr. Moran found time to dig deeper into the historical ABCs. eventually evolved a basic theory. The alphabet, says he* could have had its origin only in some great "organizing principle" common to the ancient world as 'far back as 1400 B.C. The only principle possible: religion.

Alam & Alad. In Egypt, Babylon and China, the whole culture was built on the ideas of the stargazers. Each nation was ruled by the incarnation or representative of some sort of Sun God or Son of Heaven, and each regarded the bull as the sacred animal, the chief constellation of the zodiac (or circle of life). "These correspondences," says Moran, "were not accidental. They were part of a vast cosmological system . . . The slaughter of a bull at the spring equinox on altars so far separated as Ur of the Chaldees and the Valley of the Han shows common roots in a common culture . . .