; thirst
. A simple picture of this kind became a fixed conventional sign for certain ideas; it was always drawn in the same way and it always stood for the same idea.
Picture-signs (ideographs) followed picture-writing in almost every country where the people were progressive. China was writing its books with picture-signs many thousands of years ago, and it is writing them in the same clumsy way still. Even in highly civilized countries picture-signs have not been entirely abandoned. Examine the advertising page of a newspaper or observe the business signs on the street and you will find picture-signs—pictures that are always made in the same way and that always stand for the same thing.
Each of the great nations of antiquity had its own peculiar system of writing, but the system that should interest us most is that of ancient Egypt, for it is to ancient Egypt that you must look for the origin of the book that is in your hands. The book in Egypt passed through the stages of tradition, memory aids, picture-writing and picture-signs (ideographs); then it passed into the alphabetic stage. Since the alphabet is certainly the most wonderful and perhaps the most useful of all inventions, and since it is an Egyptian invention, it is well worth your while to learn how the Egyptian picture-signs—hieroglyphics they are called—grew into letters, but if you wish to understand the change you will have to give the subject very close attention.
Well, here was the Egyptian system of picture-signs consisting of several thousand pictures of birds, beasts, reptiles, insects, trees, flowers, and objects of almost every description. Now suppose you were employed in writing English by means of several thousand picture-signs and in the course of an hour would have to write the words manage, mansion, mantle, mandate, might it not occur to you that it would be a good thing if that sound man could be represented by the picture-sign for man (
)? And if you had to write treacle, treason, treaty, might you not feel like beginning these words with a tree (
)? At some time in the remote past Egyptian scribes—priests they usually were—noticing that syllables identical in sound were constantly recurring in the different words, began to represent these syllable-sounds that occurred most frequently by picture-signs.[20] The picture-sign substituted for a syllable-sound was placed in the word not because it stood for an idea, but because it stood for a sound, just as in the case supposed above you would use the [symbol: man] or the [symbol: tree] not because it represented a thought, but because it had a certain sound. So certain Egyptian picture-signs began to be used to represent the sound of certain syllables. The picture-signs thus chosen were called phonograms.