Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/107

 THE PHOENICIAN WRITING. 87 well have a genuine admiration for it, and speak of jt as a present to men from Thoth, the ibis-headed god ; but to strangers wishing to master it its merits would be less evident. To them the task would be facilitated neither by native predisposition, nor by the effects of a professional education begun at an age when the freshness and elasticity of the memory allow much to be asked from it. I doubt very much whether any man of foreign race, either Greek or Syrian, ever managed to work his way into the ranks of the Egyptian scribes, or even entertained such a hopeless ambition. And yet to the Syrians w r ho frequented the ports and principal towns of Lower Egypt it must have been very tantalizing to see the king's overseers and the nome princes taking account of frontier dues, of the quantities of grain, and of the heads of cattle and game which were sold in the markets. 1 Such a sight must have roused their envy much more readily than the pompous inscriptions on the pylons and temple w T alls. Their ambition was not of the grandiose kind. In this world, where other men thought so much of gaining battles, their only wish was to gain money. For their purposes it was all-important that they should master some form of cursive writing. What an advantage it would be to be able to write down day by day, or rather hour by hour, all transactions begun or ended, and every engagement entered into ; what a pleasure to have something to trust to beyond memory, and especially beyond the memory of a debtor ! But the cursive writing of Egypt vas hardly less difficult for the stranger than the hieroglyphs. Like the latter it included characters of very different values, and before it could be used with any ease, the hieroglyphs themselves, of which it was in fact an abbreviation, had to be learnt. Before a foreigner could manage such a machine it required to be simplified ; the multitude of symbols had to be reduced to a comparatively small number ; and there was only one way of doing this with any success. In any ideographic system of writing the symbols are no doubt less numerous than the objects and ideas to be symbolized, but the difference is comparatively small, and it is clear that any figurative method requires a very large number of signs. The different vowel-sounds in their union with the various consonants also give rise to a good many combinations, so that a writing founded on the notation of syllables requires a great many characters there 1 Art in Ancient Egypt, Q. I. Figs. 19 and 21.