ABSTRACT
It was fitting that a literary man who was also an anthropologist should feel curious about the beginnings of language as communicated in a form of what we would broadly call writing. Accordingly, in 1904, there appeared Lang’s essay ‘The origin of the alphabet’, in the course of which he makes a touching reference to his Scottish alma mater, the University of St Andrews, in connection with physical evidence of a distant past, as uncovered in the course of campus activity. Lang’s piece is a case study which seeks to bolster his view that much of what was assumed to be ‘savage’ was actually quite civilised. He argues that alphabetical signs belong to a period long before the Phoenicians: ‘it does seem strange that men of all races, ages, and climes should have produced identical signs by conventionalising pictures of different real objects’ (Lang 1904: 635).
