Such a use of symbols obviously extends the range of utility of a nascent art of writing. Then in due course some wonderful psychologist–or perhaps the joint efforts of many generations of psychologists–made the astounding discovery that the human voice, which seems to flow on in an unbroken stream of endlessly varied modulations and intonations, may really be analyzed into a comparatively limited number of component sounds–into a few hundreds of syllables. That wonderful idea conceived, it was only a matter of time until it would occur to some other enterprising genius that by selecting an arbitrary symbol to represent each
one of these elementary sounds it would be possible to make a written record of the words of human speech which could be reproduced–rephonated–by some one who had never heard the words and did not know in advance what this written record contained.
This, of course, is what every child learns to do now in the primer class, but we may feel assured that such an idea never occurred to any human being until the peculiar forms of pictographic writing just referred to had been practised for many centuries. Yet, as we have said, some genius of prehistoric Egypt conceived the idea and put it into practical execution, and the hieroglyphic writing of which the Egyptians were in full possession at the very beginning of what we term the historical period made use of this phonetic system along with the ideographic system already described.
So fond were the Egyptians of their pictorial symbols used ideographically that they clung to them persistently throughout the entire period of Egyptian history. They used symbols as phonetic equivalents very frequently, but they never learned to depend upon them exclusively. The scribe always interspersed his phonetic signs with some other signs intended as graphic aids.
After spelling a word out in full, he added a picture, sometimes even two or three pictures, representative of the individual thing, or at least of the type of thing to which the word belongs. Two or three illustrations will make this clear.
Thus qeften, monkey, is spelled out in full, but the picture of a monkey is added as a determinative; second, qenu, cavalry, after being spelled, is made unequivocal by the introduction of a picture of a horse; third, temati, wings, though spelled elaborately, has pictures of wings added; and fourth, tatu, quadrupeds, after being spelled, has a picture of a quadruped, and then the picture of a hide, which is the usual determinative of a quadruped, followed by three dashes to indicate the plural number.
It must not be supposed, however, that it was a mere whim which led the Egyptians to the use of this system of determinatives.
There was sound reason back of it. It amounted to no more than the expedient we adopt when we spell “to,” “two,” or “too,” in indication of a single sound with three different meanings. The Egyptian language abounds in words having more than one meaning, and in writing these it is obvious that some means of distinction is desirable. The same thing occurs even more frequently in the Chinese language, which is monosyllabic. The Chinese adopt a more clumsy expedient, supplying a different symbol for each of the meanings of a syllable; so that while the actual word-sounds of their speech are only a few hundreds in number, the characters of their written language mount high into the thousands.
BABYLONIAN WRITING
While the civilization of the Nile Valley was developing this extraordinary system of hieroglyphics, the inhabitants of Babylonia were practising the art of writing along somewhat different lines. It is certain that they began with
picture-making, and that in due course they advanced to the development of the syllabary; but, unlike their Egyptian cousins, the men of Babylonia saw fit to discard the old system when they had perfected a better one.[5] So at a very early day their writing–as revealed to us now through the recent excavations–had ceased to have that pictorial aspect which distinguishes the Egyptian script. What had originally been pictures of objects–fish, houses, and the like–had come to be represented by mere aggregations of wedge-shaped marks. As the writing of the Babvlonians was chiefly inscribed on soft clay, the adaptation of this wedge-shaped mark in lieu of an ordinary line was probably a mere matter of convenience, since the sharp-cornered implement used in making the inscription naturally made a wedge-shaped impression in the clay. That, however, is a detail. The essential thing is that the Babylonian had so fully analyzed the speech-sounds that he felt entire confidence in them, and having selected a sufficient number of conventional characters–each made up of wedge-shaped lines–to represent all the phonetic sounds of his language, spelled the words out in syllables and to some extent dispensed with the determinative signs which, as we have seen, played so prominent a part in the Egyptian writing. His cousins the Assyrians used habitually a system of writing the foundation of which was an elaborate phonetic syllabary; a system, therefore, far removed from the old crude pictograph, and in some respects much more developed than the complicated Egyptian method; yet, after all, a system that stopped short of perfection by the wide gap that separates the syllabary from the true alphabet.