Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/476

454 a fish, a hippopotamus, placed one after the other, while the Mexican would have given a synthetic symbolic representation of the action by a picture of the Great Spirit chastising an evil-doer, or in some other like way. But, in the second place, the Egyptian system had taken the yet more important step—one which, if followed up, would have brought it to the condition of a real alphabet—of indicating simple sounds, phonetic elements, by a part of its figures. That such a step lies not far off from the homonymic designation of a thing by something which called to the mind the sounds of which its name was composed, is evident enough; still, no little insight and tact was needed in order to bridge over and cross the interval, and we do not apprehend so fully as we could desire the details of the movement. It appears, however, that the figure of an object was first made to designate some other conception whose name agreed with its own in the consonantal elements, to the exclusion of the more variable vowels; and then, by a farther abstraction, instead of designating thus a part of the phonetic elements of its own name, it came to signify the initial element only, whether consonant or vowel. For example, the figure of a lion, labo, is used to represent l; that of an eagle, ahom, to represent a. Proper names are written almost exclusively in this style of characters, and the decipherment of the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra on the inscription of the famous Rosetta stone, as set down distinctly in pure phonetic signs, was the first step in our recovery of the key to the hieroglyphs. In ordinary texts, the phonetic, homonymic, and symbolical characters are intricately mingled, variously aiding, explaining, and supplementing one another's meaning. Thus, the signs for Osiris (Hesiri), already given, are always accompanied by the figure of a peculiar hammer or hatchet, which some unknown reason has made one of the standard symbols of divinity; the verb ti, 'give,' having been once written phonetically, has the symbolic outstretched arm with gift added by way of farther explanation; and so on.

In monumental, and to some extent also in literary use, the hieroglyphs maintained, as already remarked, their pictorial form unaltered, as long as the kingdom and civilization