Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/96

 76 A Short History of The World At first writing was merely an abbreviated method of pic- torial record. Even before Neolithic times men were beginning to write. The Azilian rock pictures to which we have already referred show the beginning of the process. Many of them record hunts and expeditions, and in most of these the human figures are plainly drawn. But in some the painter would not bother with head and limbs ; he just indicated men by a vertical and one or two transverse strokes. From this to a conven- tional con- densed pic- ture writing was an easy transition. In Sumeria, where the writing was done on clay with a stick, the dabs of the charac- ters soon became un- recognizably unlike the things they stood for, but in Egypt where men painted on walls and on strips of the papyrus reed (the first paper) the likeness to the thing imitated remained. From the fact that the wooden styles used in Sumeria made wedge-shaped marks the Sumerian writing is called cuneiform ( — wedge-shaped). An important step towards writing was made when pictures were used to indicate not the thing represented but some similar thing. In the rebus dear to children of a suitable age, this is still done to-day. We draw a camp with tents and a bell, and the child is delighted to guess that this is the Scotch name Campbell. The BRICK OF HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON ABOUT 2200 B.C. Note the cuneiform characters of the inscription, which records the building of a temple to a Sun God