Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/643

Rh ALPHABET 605 values of seizing, possessing, and understanding. To seize in the spoken language must have been mat, or something very like it (imid occurs in this sense in the Scythian), for this phonetic value also belonged to one symbol. But further, in Accadian a mountain was called kur ; sunrise, kurra; earth was mat; to go was mit; and these sounds, identical or nearly identical, were every one expressed by the same symbol, which thus had eight ideographic and two phonetic values, kur and mat; and in this wretched condition it was taken by the Assyrians, and employed by them in all these different senses. But this was not all. In the Assyrian language kur was the name of a furnace, and mat meant to die ; and as it must have been to obtain a visible exponent for these sounds that the foreign symbol was adopted, both of these ideas were necessarily denoted by it. Again, in Assyrian, &quot; to understand &quot; was pro nounced as not, and to &quot; possess &quot; was nal; and so were added two more phonetic values by reason of the meta- phoric value of mat in Accadian. Lastly was added the phonetic value shat, because that was the Assyrian name for a mountain, which we saw was denoted in Accadian by kur. Thus, when an Assyrian came upon this little plain- looking symbol he had to determine whether it meant the earth, a mountain, sunrise, a furnace, or seizing, possessing, understanding, going, or dying ; or whether it had only one of the phonetic values, kur, mat, shat, nal, or nat. And a large list of other symbols is given by M. Oppert, which, in a similar way, have two, three, four, and even six different phonetic values. It may seem incredible that a people under such difficulties should ever have been able to express what they wished to say, much less to understand what was written. It is a great witness to the strength of the feeling which must have existed in these old people that ideography was the natural and proper method of writing, and phonetics were only a supplement to eke out its deficiencies. To us such a feeling is at first incompre hensible, but after such an example we cannot doubt its existence. With respect, indeed, to the difficulty caused by one symbol having many ideographic values, we have only to think of the many different significations expressed in our own language by the same combination of sound, without any confusion arising, because the particular meaning is marked out by the context; for instance, when the one sound but denotes a conjunction, a verb; and a noun with two senses one original and one derived, but now quite different, we should therefore only see in the Assyrian an aggravated case of this want of clearness. But the difficulty is much more serious when the same symbol has different phonetic values; and much help can not have been obtained from the grammatical lists which have actually been dug out under the superintendence of Mr Layard, in which the Assyrian kings state, avowedly for the instruction of their subjects, the different values which each symbol could possess. (See Oppert, ii. 53.) By these lists some limit might undoubtedly be put to the further multipli cation of values for the same sign, but it could not help a reader to trace which of all the authorised values he was to give to a symbol at any particular time. It would appear that in the cuneiform, as unquestionably in the Egyptian, conventional phonetic symbols could be used as complements to other symbols, which might represent an idea or a mere syllable, and by these phonetic comple ments the special sense could be defined with some approach to exactness. But into these remedies of the ills of poly phony we need not further enter. It is far beyond the scope of the present article to describe fully the development of hieroglyphism in Egypt, the country in which the last step to alphabetism the separation of the vowel-symbols from those which mark the consonants was undoubtedly taken, though with much faltering, and even turning back. According to M. Lenor- mant, the Egyptians passed through every stage which we have already seen successively reached by different peoples; and at one of which every one of these peoples halted, with out ever achieving for themselves the triumph of alphabetic writing. And evidence of each stage, more or less distinct, certainly lingers in the Egyptian, producing an extra ordinary medley, little suited for popular or even literary use, but well adapted for the transmission of occult records and rituals, the purpose for which the Greeks not un naturally supposed the whole hieroglyphic system to have been invented by the priests. As we have already de scribed the phenomena of each stage with some fulness, it is not necessary to do more here than to indicate their occurrence in Egyptian. The hieroglyphs themselves are certainly the finest of their kind. Whether they represent the full contour of the object with all the assistance of vivid colouring, or whether they are simply formed by lines which convey its essential character a practice which doubtless owed its origin to the increased use of writing it is impossible not to admire the extraordinary complete ness of the representation. Nothing can be more perfectly pictorial than the portraiture of the different emotions, each by the figure of a man affected by it : the position of the body and the gestures of the arms are simply perfect. These belong in the main to the symbolic use of the hieroglyphs : this use we saw in Chinese was but slight, but in Egypt it was immense. Thus, the sun, with rays streaming from it, denoted to the Egyptian light and clear ness ; the moon, with its horns turned downward, denoted the month, in these cases the cause is put for the effect. Sometimes the part is put for the whole : two arms, one holding a shield and one an offensive weapon, express battle ; two legs with the feet denote movement, forward or backward according to the direction of the feet, ^/^ or /. ; an arm holding a stick denotes force. Sometimes the symbol is purely metaphorical : as when a king is expressed by a bee ; knowledge by a roll of papyrus ; or justice by the feather of an ostrich, because all feathers of that bird were supposed to be of equal length. Such symbols are clearly of later origin than the other ; they imply the existence of conventional rules, which could acquire currency for meanings quite unintelligible in them selves. These symbolic ideograms were not very often used alone ; most commonly they accompanied other symbols used phonetically, merely to determine their special meaning in each place : as such they are commonly called determinatives ; this practice we also saw in China, less skilfully employed. Thus, for example, on the Rosetta stone whose trilingual inscription, hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek, is the basis of all our knowledge of Egyptian writing the word for a decree is expressed by characters, consonant and vowel, which denote the sounds of which it is composed, just as in any modern writing ; but at the end of these, forming part of the word, though adding nothing to its pronunciation, is the figure of a man with his hand raised to his mouth, which adds the idea of pas sive obedience to the phonetic combination, and limits it to the idea of a decree. In like manner, the arm with the stick, which as we said denotes force, is added as a deter minative to express actions which require force ; and the ideogram of motion is also very frequent. This seems to us unnecessary and cumbrous ; but when a phonetic com bination might have two different meanings, they could hardly have been differentiated in a more intelligible manner. A good list of these symbols may be seen in De Rosny, p. 46. The traces of the rebus stage which we saw in the Aztec,