The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study

by C. F. Keary

The step from picturing or picture-drawing to writing by pictures is, as we have said, an immense one. But now we have to record one more step, almost as great, which is the transition from the picturing of single things—or, if you wish, single ideas—to the picturing, not of ideas at all, but of sounds merely. This is the step we have now to follow out, to trace the process through which picture-writing passed into sound-writing, and to find out how signs (for we shall see they are the same signs) which were originally meant to recall objects to the eye, have ended in being used to suggest, or, shall we say, picture, sounds to the ear. This is what we mean by phonetic writing. A written word, let us remember, is the picture of a sound, and it is our business to hunt the letters of which it is formed through the changes they must have undergone while they were taking upon themselves the new office of suggesting sound. We said, too, that we must not expect to find any written account of this change, and that it is only by examining the forms of the records of other events that this greatest event of literature can be made out. What we want is to see the pictorial signs, while busy in telling us other history, beginning to perform their new duties side by side with the old, so that we may be sure of their identity; and this opportunity is afforded us by the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptians, who, being people disposed to cling to everything that had once been done, never altogether left off employing their first methods, even after they had taken another and yet another step towards a more perfect system of writing; but carried on the old ways and the new improvements side by side. The nature of their language, which was in part radical and in part inflexional, was one cause of this intermixture of methods in their writing; it had partly but not entirely outgrown the stage in which picture-signs are most useful. Ideograph is the proper name for a picture-sign, which, as soon as picture-writing supersedes picturing, becomes the sign for a thought quite as often as it is the sign for an object. Very ancient as are the earliest Egyptian records, we have none which belong to the time when the invention of writing was in the stage of picturing; we only conjecture that it passed through this earliest stage by finding examples of picturing mixed with their other kinds of writing. Each chapter of the Ritual, the oldest of Egyptian books, has one or more designs at its head, in which the contents of the chapter are very carefully and ingeniously pictured; and the records of royal triumphs and progresses which are cut out on temple and palace walls in ideographic and phonetic signs, are always prefaced by a large picture which tells the same story in the primitive method of picturing without words.

Egyptian writing.

The next stage of the invention, ideographic writing, the ancient Egyptians carried to great perfection, and reduced to a careful system. The signs for ideas became fixed, and were not chosen according to each writer’s fancy. Every picture had its settled value, and was always used in the same way. A sort of alphabet of ideographs was thus formed. A heart drawn in a certain way always meant ‘love,’ an eye with a tear on the lash meant ‘grief,’ two hands holding a shield and spear meant the verb ‘to fight,’ a tongue meant ‘to speak,’ a footprint ‘to travel,’ a man kneeling on the ground signified ‘a conquered enemy,’ etc. Conjunctions and prepositions had their fixed pictures, as well as verbs and nouns; ‘also’ was pictured by a coil of rope with a second band across it, ‘and’ by a coil of rope with an arm across it, ‘over’ by a circle surmounting a square, ‘at’ by the picture of a hart reposing near the sign for water—a significant picture for such a little word, which recalls to our minds the Psalm, ‘As the hart panteth after the water-brooks,’ and leads us to wonder whether the writer were familiar with the Egyptian hieroglyph.

So much was done in this way, that we almost wonder how the need for another method came to be felt; perhaps a peculiarity of the Egyptian language helped the splendid thought of picturing sound to flash one happy day into the mind of some priest, when he was laboriously cutting his sacred sentence into a temple wall. The language of ancient Egypt, like that of China, had a great many words alike in sound but different in meaning, and it could not fail to happen that some of these words with two meanings would indicate a thing easy to draw, and a thought difficult to symbolize; for example, the ancient Egyptian word neb means a basket and a ruler; and nefer means a lute and goodness. There would come a day when a clever priest, cutting a record on a wall, would bethink him of putting a lute instead of the more elaborate symbol that had hitherto been used for goodness. It was a simple change, and might not have struck any one at the time as involving more than the saving of a little trouble to hieroglyphists, but it was the germ out of which our system of writing sprang. The priest who did that had taken the first step towards picturing sound, and cut a true phonetic sign—the true if remote parent, in fact, of one of the twenty-four letters of our own alphabet.

Let us consider how the thought would probably grow. The writers once started on the road of making signs stand for sounds would observe how much fewer sounds there are than objects and ideas, and that words even when unlike are composed of the same sounds pronounced in different succession. If we were employed in painting up a notice on a wall, and intended to use ideographs instead of letters, and moreover if the words manage, mansion, manly, mantles, came into our sentence, should we not begin each of these words by a figure of a man? and again, if we had to write treacle, treason, treaty, we should begin each with a picture of a tree; we should find it easier to use the same sign often for part of a word, than to invent a fresh symbol for each entire word as we wrote it. For the remaining syllables of the words we had so successfully begun we should have to invent other signs, and we should perhaps soon discover that in each syllable there were in fact several sounds, or movements of lips or tongue, and that the same sounds differently combined came over and over again in all our words. Then we might go on to discover exactly how many movements of the speaking organs occurred in ordinary speech, and the thought of choosing a particular picture to represent each movement might occur; we should then have invented an alphabet in its earliest form. That was the road along which the ancient Egyptians travelled, but they progressed very slowly, and never quite reached its end. They began by having syllabic signs for proper names. Osiri was a name that occurred frequently in their sacred writings, and they happened to have two words in their language which made up its sound—Os a throne, iri an eye. Hence a small picture of a throne came to be the syllabic sign for the sound os, the oval of an eye for the sound iri; in like manner Totro, the name of an early king, was written by a hand Tot and a circle ro, and thus a system of spelling by syllables was established. Later they began to divide syllables into movements of the speaking organs, and to represent these movements by drawing objects whose name began with the movement intended. For example, a picture of a lion (labo) was drawn, not for the whole sound (labo), but for the liquid l; an owl (mulag) stood for the labial m; a water-jug (nem) for n. They had now, in fact, invented letters; but though they had made the great discovery they did not use it in the best way. They could not make up their minds to keep to phonetic writing, and throw away their pictures and ideographs. They continued to mix all these methods together, so that when they painted a lion—it might be a picture and mean lion, it might be a symbolic sign and mean pre-eminence, or it might be a true letter and stand for the liquid l. The Egyptians were obliged to invent a whole army of determinative signs, like those now employed by the Chinese, which they placed before their pictures to show when a group was to be read according to its sound, when it was used symbolically, and when it was a simple representation of the object intended.

We have already pointed out how among the Egyptian monuments, the sculptures on the tombs and temples, and in many of the more important papyri—as, for example, their Book of the Dead itself—we have specimens of all the three methods by which ideas may be conveyed to the eye. We have first the picture of some event—the king, say, offering sacrifice to a god,—then we have each separate word of the sentence first recorded by ideographs, then spelled by ordinary letters.

Another source of difficulty in deciphering the writing of the ancient Egyptians, is that they were not content with a single sign for a single sound; they had a great many different pictures for each letter, and used them in fanciful ways. For example, if l occurred in the name of a king or god, they would use the lion-picture to express it, thinking it appropriate; but if the same sound occurred in the name of a queen, they would use a lotus-lily as more feminine and elegant. They had as many as twenty different pictures which could be used for the first letter of our alphabet a, and thirty for the letter h, one of which closely resembles our capital H in form, being two upright palm-branches held by two arms which make the cross of the H. No letter had fewer than five pictures to express its sound, from which the writer might choose according to his fancy; or perhaps, sometimes, according to the space he had to fill up on the wall, or obelisk, where he was writing, and the effect in form and colour he wished his sentence to produce. Then again, all their letters were not quite true letters (single breathings). The Egyptians never got quite clear about vowels and consonants, and generally spelt words (unless they began with a vowel sound) by consonants only, the consonants carrying a vowel breathing as well as their own sound, and thus being syllabic signs instead of true letters.

Since much of the writing of the ancient Egyptians was used ornamentally as decoration for the walls of their houses and temples, and took with them the place of the tapestry of later times, the space required to carry out their complex system of writing was no objection to it in their eyes; neither did they care much about the difficulty of learning so elaborate an array of signs, as for many centuries the art of reading and writing was almost entirely confined to an order of priests whose occupation and glory it was. When writing became more common, and was used for ordinary as well as sacred purposes, the pictorial element disappeared from some of their styles of writing, and quick ways of making the pictures were invented, which reduced them to as completely arbitrary signs, with no resemblance to the objects intended, as the Chinese signs now are.

Hieratic and Demotic writing.

The ancient Egyptians had two ways of quick writing, the Hieratic (or priestly), which was employed for the sacred writings only, and the Demotic, used by the people, which was employed for law-papers, letters, and all writing that did not touch on religious matter or enter into the province of the priest. Yet, though literature increased and writing was much practised by people engaged in the ordinary business of life (we see pictures on the tombs of the great man’s upper servant seated before his desk and recording with reed-pen and ink-horn the numbers of the flocks and herds belonging to the farm), little was done to simplify the art of writing by the ancient Egyptians. Down to the latest times when Hieroglyphics were cut, and Demotic and Hieratic characters written, the same confusing variety of signs were employed—pictorial, ideographic, symbolic, phonetic—all mixed up together, with nothing to distinguish them but the determinative signs before spoken of, which themselves added a new element to the complexity.