[Large illustration] (273 kB)

Thus were constituted the so-called Metal Ages, during which, however, overlappings were everywhere so frequent that in many localities it is quite impossible to draw any well-marked dividing lines between the successive metal periods. Indeed a direct transition from Stone to Iron may be suspected in some places, and in any case the pure copper period appears to have nowhere been of long duration except in America, where there was no iron and little bronze.

THE AGE OF LETTERS
OR PICTOGRAPHS

Besides the metals, letters also, or at least pictorial writings such as the old rock carvings of Upper Egypt, were introduced in the Prehistoric Age, which comprises that transitional period dim memories of which lingered on far into historic times. It was an age of popular myths, folklore, demi-gods, heroes, traditions of real events, and even philosophic theories on man and his surroundings, which supplied ready to hand the copious materials afterwards worked up by the early poets, founders of new religions, and later lawgivers.

So also in China the early historians still remembered the still earlier “Age of the Three Rulers,” when people lived in caves, ate wild fruits and uncooked food, drank the blood of animals, and wore the skins of wild beasts (our Old Stone Age). Later they became less rude, learned to obtain fire by friction, and built themselves habitations of wood and foliage (our New Stone Age).

Of strictly historic times the most characteristic feature is the general use of letters, most fruitful of human inventions, since by its means everything worth preserving was perpetuated, and all useful knowledge thus tended to become accumulative. Writing systems, as we understand them, were not suddenly introduced, but gradually evolved from pictures representing things and ideas to conventional signs or symbols which first represent words, as in the Chinese script and our ciphers, and then articulate sounds, as in our alphabet. Between the two extremes—the pictograph and the letter—there are various intermediate forms, such as the rebus and the full syllable, and these transitional forms are largely preserved both in the Egyptian and Babylonian systems, which thus help to show how the pure phonetic symbols were finally reached. That was probably six thousand years ago, since we find various ancient scripts widely diffused over the Greek Archipelago (Crete, Cyprus, Asia Minor) in very early times. The hieroglyphic and cuneiform systems whence they originated were very much older, since the rock inscriptions of Upper Egypt are prior to all historic records, while the Mesopotamian city of Nippur already possessed half-pictorial, half-phonetic documents some six thousand years before the New Era.

This is an inscription in hieroglyphic writing found at Meidum, Egypt. It records the life events of King Rahotep and his Queen Nefert.

Here is an Egyptian pictograph representing the Nubians bearing gifts to the King of Egypt.