Maya signs and the alphabet - Drums of Atlantis

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Kurimeo Ahau reads chapter 7 of Ignatius Donnelly’s 1882 Atlantis book, on where letters came from. A sound alphabet is called one of the great inventions, and the European beginning is treated as unsolved, with the trail running back toward Egypt. Egyptians in the passage do not claim to have invented their picture writing. They received it from earlier people he identifies with Atlantis, and he places that Atlantis in the Americas. Those people, he says, were later remembered as gods, and a Phoenician tradition credits writing to a figure he equates with Thoth and the first Hermes. Letters often blamed on the Phoenicians are, for him, older forms carried out of America, where they began as pictures. The chapter sets Maya shapes beside Phoenician, Greek, Hebrew, Moabite, and Ethiopian forms. Donnelly’s line, which he endorses, is that Phoenician and Egyptian writing share one source and that Maya signs are what is left of it. America, on this reading, is where those coastal letters took their shape. He says scholars missed this because they ignored the Maya forms.

Key points

The video reads chapter 7 of Ignatius Donnelly’s 1882 Atlantis book, on the origin of letters.
Donnelly calls the sound alphabet a major invention whose European beginning is unsolved.
Kurimeo says Egyptian picture writing was inherited from Atlantean ancestors whom he places in the Americas.
A writing god in the Phoenician account is equated with Thoth and the first Hermes.
Maya letter shapes are compared with Phoenician, Greek, Hebrew, Moabite, and Ethiopian forms, then simplified.
The endorsed conclusion is that Maya signs preserve the common source of the Phoenician and Egyptian alphabets.