Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/43

 THE WEDGES. 23 the alphabet that men will use as long as they think and write was reserved for the Phoenicians. Even when their civilization was at its height the Babylonians never came so near to alphabetism as the Egyptians. This is not the place for an inquiry into the reasons of their failure, nor even for an explanation how signs with a phonetic value forced themselves in among the ideograms, and became gradually more and more im- portant. Our interest in the two kinds of writing is of a different nature ; we have to learn and explain their influence upon the plastic arts in the countries where they were used. In our attempt to define the style of Egyptian sculpture and to give reasons for its peculiar characteristics, we felt obliged to attri- bute great importance to the habits of eye and hand suggested and confirmed by the cutting and painting of the hieroglyphs. In their monumental inscriptions, if nowhere else, the symbols of the Egyptian system retained their concrete imagery to the end ; and the images, though abridged and simplified, never lost their resem- blance ; l and if it is necessary to know something more than the particular animal or thing which they represent before we can get at their meaning, that is only because in most cases they had a metaphorical or even a purely phonetic signification as well as their ideographic one. For the most part, however, it is easy to recognize their origin, and in this they differ greatly from the symbols of the first Chaldsean alphabet. In the very oldest docu- ments there are certain ideograms that, when we are warned, o> remind us of the natural objects from which their forms have been taken, but the connection is slight and difficult of apprehension. Even in the case of those characters whose forms most clearly suggest their true figurative origin, it would have been impossible to assign its prototype to each without the help of later texts, where, with more or less modification, they formed parts of sen- tences whose general significance was known. Finally, the Assyrian syllabaries have preserved the meaning of signs, that, so far as we can judge, would otherwise have been stumbling-blocks even to the wise men of Nineveh when they were confronted with such ancient inscriptions as those whose fragments are still found among the ruins of Lower Chaldaea. Even in the remote days that saw the most venerable of these inscriptions cut, the images upon which their forms were based 1 See the History of Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. pp. 350-3 (?).