Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/51

 THE WEDGES. 31 phonetic signs always represented syllables. No one of the wedge- using communities made that decisive step in advance of which the honour belongs to the Phoenicians alone. No one of them carried the analysis of language so far as to reduce the syllable to its elements, and to distinguish the consonant, mute by itself, from the. vowel upon which it depends, if we may say so, for an active life. All those races who have not borrowed their alphabet en^ bloc from their neighbours or predecessors but have invented it for themselves, began with the imitation of objects. At first we have a mere outline, made to gratify some special want. 1 The more these figures were repeated, the more they tended towards a single stereotyped form, and that an epitomized and conventional one. They were only signs, so that it was not in the least necessary to painfully reproduce every feature of the original model, as if the latter were copied for its plastic beauty. As time passed on, writing and drawing won separate existences ; but at first they were not to be distinguished one from the other, the latter was but a use of the former, and, in a sense, we may even say that writing was the first and simplest of the plastic arts. In Egypt this art remained more faithful to its origin than else- where. Even when it had attained the highest development it ever reached in that country, and was on the point of crowning its achievements by the invention of a true alphabet, it continued to reproduce the general shapes and contours of objects. The hiero- glyphs were truly a system of writing by which all the sounds of the language could be noted and almost reduced to their final elements ; but they were also, up to their last day, a system of design in which the characteristic features of genera and species, if not of individuals, were carefully distinguished. Was it the same in Chaldsea ? Had the methods, and what we may call the style of the national writing, any appreciable influence upon the plastic arts, upon the fashion in which living nature was understood and reproduced ? We do not think it had, and the reason of the difference is not far to seek. The very oldest of the ideographic signs of Chaldaea are much farther removed from the objects upon which they were based than the Egyptian hieroglyphs ; 1 Hence the name pictography which some scholars apply to this primitive form of writing. The term is clear enough, but unluckily it is ill composed : it is a hybrid of Greek and Latin, which is sufficient to prevent its acceptance by us.