Page:Van Loon--The Story of Mankind.djvu/69

Rh until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail-writing of western Asia.

Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings, the job of Champollion had been an easy one. The Egyptians used pictures. But the Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the idea of scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded pictures entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which showed little connection with the pictures out of which they had been developed. A few examples will show you what I mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into a brick looked as follows:. This sign however was too cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of "heaven" was added to that of star the picture was simplified in this way which made it even more of a puzzle. In the same way an ox changed from into  and a fish changed from  into. The sun was originally a plain circle and became. If we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an look like. This system of writing down our