Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/49

 THE WEDGES. 29 terra-cotta inscriptions, we fall to doubting whether the hollow marks of which they are composed could have been made by such a point. There is no sign of those scratches which we should expect to find left by a sharp instrument in its process of cutting out and removing part of the clay. The general appearance of the surface leads us rather to think that the strokes were made by thrusting some instrument with a sharp ridge like the corner of a flat rule, into the clay, and that nothing was taken away as in the case of wood or marble, but an impression made by driving back the earth into itself. 1 However this may be, the first element of the cuneiform writing was a hollow incision made by a single movement of the hand, and of a form which may be compared to a greatly elongated triangle. These triangles were sometimes horizontal, sometimes vertical, sometimes oblique, and when arranged in more or less complex groups, could easily furnish all the necessary symbols. In early ages, the elements of some of these ideographic or phonetic signs signs which after- vards became mere complex groups of wedges were so arranged as to suggest the primitive forms that is, the more or less roughly blocked out images from which they had originally sprung. The fish may easily be recognized in the following group while the character that stands for the sun, "> reminds us of the lozenge which was the primitive sign for that luminary. In the two symbols fc> and <|, we may with a little good will, recognize a shovel with its handle, and an ear. But even in the oldest texts the instances in which the primitive types are still recognizable are very few ; the wedge has in nearly every case completely transfigured, and, so to speak, decomposed, their original features. This is the case even in what is called the Sumerian system itself, and when its signs and processes were borrowed by other nations, the tendency to abandon figuration was of course still more marked. It has now been clearly proved that the wedges have served the turn of at least four languages beside that of the people who devised them, and that in passing from one people to another 1 LAYARD, Nineveh and its Remains, vol. ii. p. 180.