A Selected Alphabet of Hungarian Illuminated Miniatures/Miniaturen-Alphabet aus Ungarn [antikvár]

The letter is a basic factor and bearer of human culture. Without it we could neither write or read nor print books, nor could science progress, since each generation would have to start everything afresh. It is, therefore, worth giving a thought to the wayJetters came into being, and writing was invented with the aid of which we can record and communicate our thoughts. Even prehistoric man had messages to communicate to his fellows who lived some distance away. He used the simplest means: pictures which were understood by everybody. The simple communications of the earliest times grew gradually richer and developed into quite long texts in picture-writing, such as the description of the deeds of Egyptian Pharaos re- corded in their tombs in symbolic images. In the course of time the action of writing had to be speeded up. As a result the pictures grew simpler; they gradually lost their original meaning and became only a phonetic symbol, in other words a letter. Thus, originally, the oldest form of the modern letter A showed the head of an ox, called aleph in Semitic languages; the corresponding Greek word alpha, deriv- ing from it, was finally reduced to the symbol of the sound A. At first both picture-writing and alphabetical writing were practiced by only a limited number of people, the scribes, who developed their work into a real art. The writing of finely shaped, clear-cut characters, the painting of pictures and figures in illustration of the text, and later, the ornamentation of initials or even of whole pages became a special and richly varied kind of art. The custom of illustrating and explaining the written text with pictures can be traced back to antiquity. The prayers