Indian picture writing. The biography of a chief. The next step forward is the attempt to represent abstract ideas by means of pictures. The picture then ceases to represent an object and represents an idea. This is called an ideogram. While it has certain very obvious limitations, it has one advantage over more developed systems. The ideogram does not represent a word; it represents an idea. Consequently it may be intelligible to people who, in spoken language, represent the idea by very different words. For example, there are several cases where a common set of ideograms appears to have been used as a means of communication between people whose spoken language was mutually unintelligible. The Chinese sign for “words” made thus
is a typical ideogram. It represents a mouth with vapor rising from it.
The next step forward is the development of the ideogram into the phonogram, or sound sign. When this step is taken, the ideogram, besides representing an idea in a general way, represents a sound, usually the name of the object represented by the ideogram or by one of its components. A succession of these phonograms then represents a series of sounds, or syllables, and we have a real, though somewhat primitive and cumbrous, written language. Concurrently with this process the original picture has become conventionalized and abbreviated. In this shape it is hardly recognizable as a picture at all and appears to be a mere arbitrary sign.
Comparative ideographs.
After a time men discovered that all the sounds of the human voice were really decomposable into a very few and that all human speech, consisting as it does of combinations of these sounds, could be represented by combinations of simple phonograms each of which should represent neither an idea nor a syllable but one of the primary sounds. The phonograms were then greatly reduced in number, simplified in form, and became what we know to-day as letters.
This process appears to have gone on independently in many parts of the world. In many places it never got to the point of an alphabet, and this arrest of development is not inconsistent with a high degree of civilization. The Chinese and Japanese script, for example, are to this day combinations of ideograms and phonograms.
Three of the great peoples of antiquity carried this process nearly or quite to a conclusion, although the method followed and the results reached were quite different in the three cases. The three civilizations, of the Egyptians in the Nile Valley, the Assyrio-Babylonians in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the Cretans, centering in Crete but spreading extensively through the Mediterranean Basin, developed three great varieties of script. All started with pictures. The Egyptians continued to use the pictures in their formal inscriptions down to the Persian conquest in the 6th century B.C. This picture writing or hieroglyphic was well developed and in the phonogram stage about 5000 B.C. The formal picture writing of the hieroglyphic was admirably suited to formal inscriptions either carved in stone or painted on a variety of substances. It was not suited, however, to the more rapid work of the recorder, the correspondent, or the literary man. The scribes, or writers, therefore developed a highly abbreviated and conventionalized form of hieroglyphic which could be easily written with a reed pen on papyrus, a writing material to be described presently. The first specimens of papyrus, containing the earliest known specimens of this kind of writing, called hieratic, date from about 3550 B.C. Even the hieratic was too formal and cumbersome for the common people and was further abbreviated and conventionalized into an alphabet known as the demotic which was in common use among the Egyptians from about 1900 B.C. to 400 A.D.