Such syllabic signs may be used either singly, as above, or in combination, as we shall see illustrated in a moment.
But one other stage of evolution is possible; namely, the use of signs with a purely alphabetical significance. The Egyptians made this step also, and their strangely conglomerate writing makes use of the following alphabet:
a ȧ ạ̄ i u b p f m n r and l h ḥ χ (kḥ) s ś (sh) k q ḳ t ṭ θ (th) t´ (tch)
In a word, then, the Egyptian writing has passed through all the stages of development, from the purely pictorial to the alphabetical, but with this strange qualification—that while advancing to the later stages it retains the use of the crude earlier forms. As Canon Taylor has graphically phrased it, the Egyptian writing is a completed structure, but one from which the scaffolding has not been removed.
The next step would have been to remove the now useless scaffolding, leaving a purely alphabetical writing as the completed structure. Looking at the matter from the modern standpoint, it seems almost incredible that so intelligent a people as the Egyptians should have failed to make this advance. Yet the facts stand, that as early as the time of the Pyramid Builders, say 4000 years B.C., the Egyptians had made the wonderful analysis of sounds without which the invention of an alphabet would be impossible. They had set aside certain of their hieroglyphic symbols and given them alphabetical significance. They had learned to write their words with the use of this alphabet; and it would seem as if, in the course of a few generations, they must come to see how unnecessary was the cruder form of picture writing which this alphabet would naturally supplant; but in point of fact they never did come to a realisation of this seemingly simple proposition. Generation after generation, and century after century, they continued to use their same cumbersome, complex writing, and it remained for an outside nation to prove that an alphabet pure and simple was capable of fulfilling all the conditions of a written language.
Thus in practice there is found in the hieroglyphics the strangest combination of ideographs, syllabic signs, and alphabetical signs or true letters, used together indiscriminately.
It was, for example, not at all unusual after spelling a word syllabically or alphabetically to introduce a figure giving the idea of the thing intended, and then even to supplement this with a so-called determinative sign or figure:
qeften monkey. qenu cavalry. temati wings. t´ātu quadrupeds.