A HISTORY OF SCIENCE

As has just been suggested, the new knowledge, particularly that which related to the great antiquity of characters similar to the Phoenician alphabetical signs, is somewhat disconcerting. Its general trend, however, is quite in the same direction with most of the new archaeological knowledge of recent decades—that is to say, it tends to emphasize the idea that human civilization in most of its important elaborations is vastly older than has hitherto been supposed. It may be added, however, that no definite clews are as yet available that enable us to fix even an approximate date for the origin of the Phoenician alphabet. The signs, to which reference has been made, may well have been in existence for thousands of years, utilized merely as property marks, symbols for counting and the like, before the idea of setting them aside as phonetic symbols was ever conceived.

Nothing is more certain, in the judgment of the present-day investigator, than that man learned to write by slow and painful stages. It is probable that the conception of such an analysis of speech sounds as would make the idea of an alphabet possible came at a very late stage of social evolution, and as the culminating achievement of a long series of improvements in the art of writing. The precise steps that marked this path of intellectual development can for the most part be known only by inference; yet it is probable that the main chapters of the story may be reproduced with essential accuracy.

FIRST STEPS

For the very first chapters of the story we must go back in imagination to the prehistoric period. Even barbaric man feels the need of self-expression, and strives to make his ideas manifest to other men by pictorial signs. The cave-dwellers scratched pictures of men and animals on the surface of a reindeer horn or mammoth tusk as mementos of his prowess. The American Indian does essentially the same thing to-day, making pictures that crudely record his successes in war and the chase.

The Northern Indian had got no farther than this when the white man discovered America; but the Aztecs of the Southwest and the Maya people of Yucatan had carried their picture- making to a much higher state of elaboration.[3] They had developed systems

of pictographs or hieroglyphics that would doubtless in the course of generations have been elaborated into alphabetical systems, had not the Europeans cut off the civilization of which they were the highest exponents.

What the Aztec and Maya were striving towards in the sixteenth century A.D., various Oriental nations had attained at least five or six thousand years earlier. In Egypt at the time of the pyramid-builders, and in Babylonia at the same epoch, the people had developed systems of writing that enabled them not merely to present a limited range of ideas pictorially, but to express in full elaboration and with finer shades of meaning all the ideas that pertain to highly cultured existence. The man of that time made records of military achievements, recorded the transactions of every-day business life, and gave expression to his moral and spiritual aspirations in a way strangely comparable to the manner of our own time. He had perfected highly elaborate systems of writing.

EGYPTIAN WRITING

Of the two ancient systems of writing just referred to as being in vogue at the so-called dawnings of history, the more picturesque and suggestive was the hieroglyphic system of the Egyptians. This is a curiously conglomerate system of writing, made up in part of symbols reminiscent of the crudest stages of picture-writing, in part of symbols having the phonetic value of syllables, and in part of true alphabetical letters. In a word, the Egyptian writing represents in itself the elements of the various stages through which the art of writing has developed.[4]

We must conceive that new features were from time to time added to it, while the old features, curiously enough, were not given up.

Here, for example, in the midst of unintelligible lines and pot-hooks, are various pictures that are instantly recognizable as representations of hawks, lions, ibises, and the like. It can hardly be questioned that when these pictures were first used calligraphically they were meant to represent the idea of a bird or animal. In other words, the first stage of picture-writing did not go beyond the mere representation of an eagle by the picture of an eagle. But this, obviously, would confine the presentation of ideas within very narrow limits. In due course some inventive genius conceived the thought of symbolizing a picture. To him the outline of an eagle might represent not merely an actual bird, but the thought of strength, of courage, or of swift progress.

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