Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/475

XII.] application, it is peculiarly a commemorative and monumental mode of writing, and it retains to the last strictly its pictorial form; every one of its separate signs is the representation of some visible object, however far it may be removed in use from being a designation of that object. It is in this respect like a language which has never forgotten the derivation of its words, or corrupted their etymological form, however much it may have altered their meaning. On the Egyptian monuments are found, accompanied and described by the hieroglyphics, many and various pictorial scenes—such as kings besieging cities or leading trains of captives, individuals making offerings to divinities, souls undergoing judgment and retribution, and other the like—all of which are cast in conventional form, and often contain symbolic elements: their intent is much more didactic than artistic; they are meant to inform rather than to illustrate: these, then, are with evident plausibility assumed still to represent the earliest, purely pictorial, stage of Egyptian writing, corresponding with that illustrated above by an example furnished by our own aborigines; while the hieroglyphs grew out of the attempt—also finding its analogue in the totem-figures of that example, and still more fully in the Mexican delineations—to designate and explain the persons and actions depicted. The ways in which this end was attained, and figured signs made indicative of names and abstract ideas, were various: homonymy and symbolism were both fertile of characters: thus, the name of the god Osiris, Hesiri, was written by the two figures of a kind of seat (?), hes, and an eye, iri; the figure of a basket, neb, signified also neb, 'a lord:' a hand pouring libations from a vase meant 'offer in sacrifice;' an extended hand bearing some object meant ti, 'give;' the wallowing hippopotamus denoted 'filth, indecency;' and so on. But the Egyptians showed in this part of the development of their system a much higher aptitude than the Mexicans for analytic representation, for paralleling, and then identifying, the process of writing with that of speaking. In the first place, they came to be able to write symbolically such a sentence as "Young! old! God hates indecency," by the five figures of a child, an old man, a hawk,