CHAPTER XIII.

PHONETIC WRITING.

[Sidenote: Transition to phonetic writing.]

The step from picturing or picture-drawing to writing by pictures is, as we have said, an immense one. But now we have to record one more step, almost as great, which is the transition from the picturing of single things--or, if you wish, single _ideas_--to the picturing, not of ideas at all, but of sounds merely. This is the step we have now to follow out, to trace the process through which picture-writing passed into sound-writing, and to find out how signs (for we shall see they are the same signs) which were originally meant to recall objects to the eye, have ended in being used to suggest, or, shall we say, _picture_, sounds to the ear. This is what we mean by _phonetic_ writing. A written word, let us remember, is the picture of a sound, and it is our business to hunt the letters of which it is formed through the changes they must have undergone while they were taking upon themselves the new office of suggesting sound. We said, too, that we must not expect to find any written account of this change, and that it is only by examining the _forms_ of the records of other events that this greatest event of literature can be made out. What we want is to see the pictorial signs, while busy in telling us other history, beginning to perform their new duties side by side with the old, so that we may be sure of their identity; and this opportunity is afforded us by the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptians, who, being people disposed to cling to everything that had once been done, never altogether left off employing their first methods, even after they had taken another and yet another step towards a more perfect system of writing; but carried on the old ways and the new improvements side by side. The nature of their language, which was in part radical and in part inflexional, was one cause of this intermixture of methods in their writing; it had partly but not entirely outgrown the stage in which picture-signs are most useful. Ideograph is the proper name for a picture-sign, which, as soon as picture-writing supersedes picturing, becomes the sign for a thought quite as often as it is the sign for an object. Very ancient as are the earliest Egyptian records, we have none which belong to the time when the invention of writing was in the stage of picturing; we only conjecture that it passed through this earliest stage by finding examples of picturing mixed with their other kinds of writing. Each chapter of the _Ritual_, the oldest of Egyptian books, has one or more designs at its head, in which the contents of the chapter are very carefully and ingeniously pictured; and the records of royal triumphs and progresses which are cut out on temple and palace walls in ideographic and phonetic signs, are always prefaced by a large picture which tells the same story in the primitive method of picturing without words.

[Sidenote: Egyptian writing.]

The next stage of the invention, ideographic writing, the ancient Egyptians carried to great perfection, and reduced to a careful system. The signs for ideas became fixed, and were not chosen according to each writer’s fancy. Every picture had its settled value, and was always used in the same way. A sort of alphabet of ideographs was thus formed. A heart drawn in a certain way always meant ‘love,’ an eye with a tear on the lash meant ‘grief,’ two hands holding a shield and spear meant the verb ‘to fight,’ a tongue meant ‘to speak,’ a footprint ‘to travel,’ a man kneeling on the ground signified ‘a conquered enemy,’ etc. Conjunctions and prepositions had their fixed pictures, as well as verbs and nouns; ‘also’ was pictured by a coil of rope with a _second_ band across it, ‘and’ by a coil of rope with an arm across it, ‘over’ by a circle surmounting a square, ‘at’ by the picture of a hart reposing near the sign for water--a significant picture for such a little word, which recalls to our minds the Psalm, ‘As the hart panteth after the water-brooks,’ and leads us to wonder whether the writer were familiar with the Egyptian hieroglyph.

So much was done in this way, that we almost wonder how the need for another method came to be felt; perhaps a peculiarity of the Egyptian language helped the splendid thought of picturing _sound_ to flash one happy day into the mind of some priest, when he was laboriously cutting his sacred sentence into a temple wall. The language of ancient Egypt, like that of China, had a great many words alike in sound but different in meaning, and it could not fail to happen that some of these words with two meanings would indicate a thing easy to draw, and a thought difficult to symbolize; for example, the ancient Egyptian word _neb_ means a basket and a ruler; and _nefer_ means a lute and goodness. There would come a day when a clever priest, cutting a record on a wall, would bethink him of putting a lute instead of the more elaborate symbol that had hitherto been used for goodness. It was a simple change, and might not have struck any one at the time as involving more than the saving of a little trouble to hieroglyphists, but it was the germ out of which our system of writing sprang. The priest who did _that_ had taken the first step towards picturing sound, and cut a true phonetic sign--the true if remote parent, in fact, of one of the twenty-four letters of our own alphabet.

Let us consider how the thought would probably grow. The writers once started on the road of making signs stand for sounds would observe how much fewer sounds there are than objects and ideas, and that words even when unlike are composed of the same sounds pronounced in different succession. If we were employed in painting up a notice on a wall, and intended to use ideographs instead of letters, and moreover if the words manage, mansion, manly, mantles, came into our sentence, should we not begin each of these words by a figure of a man? and again, if we had to write treacle, treason, treaty, we should begin each with a picture of a tree; we should find it easier to use the same sign often for part of a word, than to invent a fresh symbol for each entire word as we wrote it. For the remaining syllables of the words we had so successfully begun we should have to invent other signs, and we should perhaps soon discover that in each syllable there were in fact several sounds, or movements of lips or tongue, and that the same sounds differently combined came over and over again in all our words. Then we might go on to discover exactly how many movements of the speaking organs occurred in ordinary speech, and the thought of choosing a particular picture to represent each movement might occur; we should then have invented an alphabet in its earliest form. That was the road along which the ancient Egyptians travelled, but they progressed very slowly, and never quite reached its end. They began by having syllabic signs for proper names. Osiri was a name that occurred frequently in their sacred writings, and they happened to have two words in their language which made up its sound--_Os_ a throne, _iri_ an eye. Hence a small picture of a throne came to be the syllabic sign for the sound _os_, the oval of an eye for the sound _iri_; in like manner Totro, the name of an early king, was written by a hand _Tot_ and a circle _ro_, and thus a system of spelling by syllables was established. Later they began to divide syllables into movements of the speaking organs, and to represent these movements by drawing objects whose name began with the movement intended. For example, a picture of a lion (_labo_) was drawn, not for the whole sound (_labo_), but for the liquid _l_; an owl (_mulag_) stood for the labial _m_; a water-jug (_nem_) for _n_. They had now, in fact, invented letters; but though they had made the great discovery they did not use it in the best way. They could not make up their minds to keep to phonetic writing, and throw away their pictures and ideographs. They continued to mix all these methods together, so that when they painted a lion--it might be a picture and mean _lion_, it might be a symbolic sign and mean _pre-eminence_, or it might be a true letter and stand for the liquid _l_. The Egyptians were obliged to invent a whole army of determinative signs, like those now employed by the Chinese, which they placed before their pictures to show when a group was to be read according to its sound, when it was used symbolically, and when it was a simple representation of the object intended.

We have already pointed out how among the Egyptian monuments, the sculptures on the tombs and temples, and in many of the more important _papyri_--as, for example, their Book of the Dead itself--we have specimens of all the three methods by which ideas may be conveyed to the _eye_. We have first the picture of some event--the king, say, offering sacrifice to a god,--then we have each separate word of the sentence first recorded by ideographs, then spelled by ordinary letters.

Another source of difficulty in deciphering the writing of the ancient Egyptians, is that they were not content with a single sign for a single sound; they had a great many different pictures for each letter, and used them in fanciful ways. For example, if _l_ occurred in the name of a king or god, they would use the lion-picture to express it, thinking it appropriate; but if the same sound occurred in the name of a queen, they would use a lotus-lily as more feminine and elegant. They had as many as twenty different pictures which could be used for the first letter of our alphabet _a_, and thirty for the letter _h_, one of which closely resembles our capital H in form, being two upright palm-branches held by two arms which make the cross of the H. No letter had fewer than five pictures to express its sound, from which the writer might choose according to his fancy; or perhaps, sometimes, according to the space he had to fill up on the wall, or obelisk, where he was writing, and the effect in form and colour he wished his sentence to produce. Then again, all their letters were not quite true letters (single breathings). The Egyptians never got quite clear about vowels and consonants, and generally spelt words (unless they _began_ with a vowel sound) by consonants only, the consonants carrying a vowel breathing as well as their own sound, and thus being syllabic signs instead of true letters.

Since much of the writing of the ancient Egyptians was used ornamentally as decoration for the walls of their houses and temples, and took with them the place of the tapestry of later times, the space required to carry out their complex system of writing was no objection to it in their eyes; neither did they care much about the difficulty of learning so elaborate an array of signs, as for many centuries the art of reading and writing was almost entirely confined to an order of priests whose occupation and glory it was. When writing became more common, and was used for ordinary as well as sacred purposes, the pictorial element disappeared from some of their styles of writing, and quick ways of making the pictures were invented, which reduced them to as completely arbitrary signs, with no resemblance to the objects intended, as the Chinese signs now are.

[Sidenote: Hieratic and Demotic writing.]

The ancient Egyptians had two ways of quick writing, the Hieratic (or priestly), which was employed for the sacred writings only, and the Demotic, used by the people, which was employed for law-papers, letters, and all writing that did not touch on religious matter or enter into the province of the priest. Yet, though literature increased and writing was much practised by people engaged in the ordinary business of life (we see pictures on the tombs of the great man’s upper servant seated before his desk and recording with reed-pen and ink-horn the numbers of the flocks and herds belonging to the farm), little was done to simplify the art of writing by the ancient Egyptians. Down to the latest times when Hieroglyphics were cut, and Demotic and Hieratic characters written, the same confusing variety of signs were employed--pictorial, ideographic, symbolic, phonetic--all mixed up together, with nothing to distinguish them but the determinative signs before spoken of, which themselves added a new element to the complexity.

It was left for a less conservative and more enterprising people than the ancient Egyptians to take the last and greatest step in perfecting the invention which the ancient

[Sidenote: The Phœnician alphabet.]

Egyptians had brought so far on its road, and by throwing away all the first attempts, to allow the serviceable, successful parts of the system to stand out clear. The Phœnicians, to whom tradition points as the introducers of our alphabet into Europe, and who, during early ages, were in very close political and trading connection with the ancient Egyptians, are now believed to be the authors of the improvement by which we benefit. They did not invent the alphabet which the Greeks learned from them; they could have had no reason to invent signs, when they must have been well acquainted with the superabundance that had been in use for centuries before they began to build their cities by the sea-shore. What they probably did was to choose from the Egyptian characters, with which all the traders of the world must have been familiar, just so many phonemes or sound-carrying signs as represented the sounds of which their speech was made up; and rejecting all others, they kept strictly to these chosen ones in all their future writings. This was a great work to have accomplished, and we must not suppose that it was done by one man, or even in one generation; as probably it took a very long time to perfect the separation between vowels and consonants: a distinction which had already been made by the ancient Egyptians, for they had vowel signs, though, as before remarked, they constantly made their consonants carry the vowels, and spelt words with consonants alone. You will remember that consonants are the most important elements of language, and constitute, as we have said before, the bones of words; but also that distinctions of time, person, and case depend in an early stage of language very much on vowels; and you will therefore understand how important to clearness of expression it was to have clearly defined separate signs for the vowels and diphthongs that had, so to speak, all the exactitude of meaning in their keeping. The Phœnicians, of all the people in the early world, were most in need of a clear and precise method of writing: for, being the great traders and settlers of ancient times, one of its principal uses would be to enable them to communicate with friends at a distance by means of writings which should convey the thoughts of the absent ones, or the private instructions of a trader to his partner without need of an interpreter.

The advantages of simplicity and clearness had been less felt by Egyptian priests while inscribing their stately records on walls of temples and palaces, and on the tapering sides of obelisks which were meant to lift sacred words up to the eye of Heaven rather than to expose them to those of men. They believed that a race of priests would continue, as long as the temples and obelisks continued, who could explain the writing to those worthy to enter into its mysteries; and they were not sorry, perhaps, to keep the distinction of understanding the art of letters to their own caste.

It was not till letters were needed by busy people, who had other things to do besides studying, that the necessity for making them easy to learn, and really effective as carriers of thought across distances, was sincerely felt. Two conjectures as to the method pursued by the Phœnicians in choosing their letters and adapting them to their own language have been made by the learned. One is, that while they took the forms of their letters from the Egyptian system of signs, and adopted the principle of making each picture of an object stand for the first sound of its name, as _labo_ for _l_, they did not give to each letter the value it had in the Egyptian alphabet, but allowed it to mean for them the first sound of its name in their own language. For example, they took the sign for an ox’s head and made it stand for the sound _a_, not because it was one of the Egyptian signs for ‘_a_’ but because Aleph was the name for an ox and ‘_a_’ was its first syllable. This, which seems a natural method enough, is, however, not the method which was followed by the Japanese in choosing their alphabet from signs; and more recent investigations prove such a close resemblance between the earliest forms of Phœnician letters, and early forms of signs for the same sounds in Hieratic character, that a complete descent in sound-bearing power, as well as in form, is now claimed for our letters from those hieroglyphics, which, in our ignorance of the relationship, we used to consider a synonymous term for something unintelligible. The Semitic language spoken by the Phœnicians was richer in sounds than the less developed language spoken by the ancient Egyptians; but as the Egyptians used several signs for each letter, the Phœnicians easily fell into the habit of giving a slightly different value to two forms originally identical, and thus provided for all the more delicate distinctions of their tongue. A close comparison of the forms of the letters of the earliest known Canaanite inscriptions with Hieratic writing of the time of the Old Empire reveals a resemblance so striking between fifteen of the Phœnician letters and Hieratic characters carrying the same sounds, that a conviction of the derivation of one from the other impresses itself on even a careless observer. The correspondence of the other five Canaanite letters with their Hieratic counterparts is less obvious to the uneducated eye, but experts in such investigations see sufficient likeness even there to confirm the theory.

The gradual divergence of the Phœnician characters from their Hieratic parents is easily accounted for by the difference of the material and the instrument employed by the Phœnicians and Egyptians in writing. The Hieratic charracter was painted by Egyptian priests on smooth papyrus leaves with a brush or broad pointed reed pen. The Canaanite inscriptions are graven with a sharp instrument on hard stone, and as a natural consequence the round curves of the Hieratic character become sharp points, and there is a general simplification of form and a throwing aside of useless lines and dots, the last remnants of the picture from which each Hieratic character originally sprang. The _names_ given later to the Phœnician letters, Aleph, an ‘ox;’ Beth, a ‘house;’ Gimel, a ‘camel;’ Daleth, a ‘door;’ are not the names of the objects from which the forms of these letters were originally taken. The Hieratic ‘A’ was taken from the picture of an eagle, which stood for ‘A’ in hieroglyphics; ‘B’ was originally a sort of heron; ‘D,’ a hand with the fingers spread out. New names were given by the Phœnicians to the forms they had borrowed, from fancied resemblances to objects which, in their language, began with the sound intended, when the original Egyptian names had been forgotten. It is hard for us to see a likeness between our letter ‘A’ and an ox’s horns with a yoke across; or between ‘B’ and the ground-plan of a house; ‘G’ and a camel’s head and neck; ‘M’ and water; ‘W’ and a set of teeth; ‘P’ and the back of a head set on the neck; but our letters have gone through a great deal of straightening and putting into order since they came into Europe and were sent out on their further westward travels. The reader who has an opportunity of examining early specimens of letters on Greek coins will find a freedom of treatment which makes them much more suggestive of resemblances, and the earlier Phœnician letters were, no doubt, more pictorial still. The interesting and important thing to be remembered concerning our letters is that each one of them was, without doubt, a picture once, and gets its shape in no other way than by having once stood for an object, whose name in the ancient people’s language began with the sound it conveys to us.

These Phœnician letters, born on the walls of Egyptian tombs older than Abraham, and selected by Phœnician traders who took their boats up to Memphis at or before Joseph’s time, are the parents of all the alphabets now used in the world, with the exception of that one which the Japanese have taken from Chinese picture-writing. The Phœnicians carried their alphabet about with them to all the countries where they planted trading settlements, and it was adopted by Greeks, and by the Latins from the Greeks, and then gradually modified to suit the languages of all the civilized peoples of east and west.[138] The Hebrew square letters are a form of divergence from the original type, and even the Sanskrit character in all its various styles can be traced back to the same source by experts who have studied the transformations through which it has passed in the course of ages. It is, of course, easy to understand that these ubiquitous little shapes which through so many centuries have had the task laid on them of spelling words in so many different languages must have undergone some variations in their values to suit the tongues that interpreted them.

The original family of twenty letters have not always kept together, or avoided the intrusion of new comers. Some of the languages they have had to express, being in an early

[Sidenote: Runes.]

stage of development, have not wanted even so many as twenty letters, and have gradually allowed some of them to fall into disuse and be forgotten; an instance of this we find in the alphabet of the northern nations--the Gothic--which consisted only of sixteen _runes_--called by new names; they have been handed down either directly from the Greek, or from the Greek through the Roman alphabet, and furnished with mystic meanings and with names peculiar to themselves.

[Sidenote: Additional letters.]

In languages where nicer distinctions of sound were called for than the original twenty Phœnician signs carried, a few fresh letters were added, but in no case has any quite new form been invented. The added letters have always been a modification of one of the older forms--either a letter cut in half, or one modified by an additional stroke or dot. In this way the Romans made _G_ out of _C_, by adding a stroke to one of its horns. _V_ and _U_, _I_ and _J_ were originally slightly different ways of writing one letter, which have been taken advantage of to express a new sound when the necessity for a greater number of sound-signs arose; _W_, as its very name shows, is only a doubled form of _V_. At first sight it seems a simple thing enough to invent a letter, but let us remember that such a thing as an arbitrarily invented letter does not exist anywhere. To create one out of nothing is a feat of which human ingenuity does not seem capable. Every single letter in use anywhere (we can hardly dwell on this thought too long) has descended in regular steps from the pictured object in whose name the sound it represents originally dwelt. Shape and sound were wedded together in early days by the first beginners of writing, and all the labour bestowed on them since has only been in the way of modification and adaptation to changed circumstances. No wonder that, when people believed a whole alphabet to have been invented straight off, they also thought that it took a god to do it. Thoth, the Great-and-great, with his emblems of justice and his recording pencil; Oannes, the Sea-monster, to whom all the wonders of the under-world lay open; Swift Hermes, with his cap of invisibility and his magic staff; One-eyed Odin, while his dearly purchased draught of wisdom-water was inspiring him still. No one indeed--as we see plainly enough now--but a hero like one of these, was equal to the task of inventing an alphabet.

[Sidenote: Cuneiform writing.]

Before we have quite done with alphabets, we ought to speak of another system of ancient writing, the cuneiform; which, though it has left no trace of itself on modern alphabets, is the vehicle which preserves some of the most interesting and ancient records in the world. The cuneiform or arrow-shaped character used by the ancient Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians, is supposed to owe its peculiar form to the material on which it was habitually graven by those who employed it. It arose in a country where the temples were built of unburned brick instead of stone, and the wedge-shaped form of the lines composing the letters is precisely what would be most easily produced on wet clay by the insertion and rapid withdrawal of a blunt-pointed stick or reed. Like all other systems, it began in rude pictures, which gradually came to have a phonetic value, in the same manner as did the Egyptian hieroglyphics. The earliest records in this character are graven on the unburned bricks of pyramidal-shaped temples, which a little before the time of Abraham began to be built by a nation composed of mixed Shemite, Cushite, and Scythian (_i.e._ Turanian) peoples round the shores of the Persian Gulf. The invention of the character is ascribed in the records to the Turanian race, the Accadians, who are always designated by the sign of a wedge, which was equivalent to calling them the writers, or the literary people. The Accadians discovered this writing; but it was taken up and wrought to much greater perfection by their successors, the Shemites. In their hands it became the vehicle in which the history of the two great empires of Babylon and Nineveh, and the achievements of ancient Persian kings, have come down to us. For when Nineveh fell before the Persians, they adopted the cuneiform writing of the Assyrians.

We have all seen and wondered at the minute writing on the Assyrian marbles and tablets in the British Museum, and stood in awe before the human-headed monster gods--

‘Their flanks with dark runes fretted o’er,’

whose fate, in surviving the ruin of so many empires, and being brought from so far to enlighten us on the history of past ages, can never cease to astonish us. When we look at them again, let us spare a thought to the history of the character itself. Its mysteries have cost even greater labour to unravel than hieroglyphics themselves. To the latest times of the use of cuneiform by the Achæmenidæ, pictorial, symbolic, and phonetic groups continued to be mixed together, and a system of determinative signs was employed to show the reader in what sense each word was to be taken. But this system of writing never reached the perfection attained by the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It never advanced to the use of what may be called true letters, never beyond the use of syllabic signs. So that in time it was superseded by alphabets descended from the Egyptian. The symbolism, too, of the cuneiform writing is very complex, and the difficulty of reading the signs used phonetically is greatly increased by the fact of the language from which they acquired their values (a Turanian one) being different from the Semitic tongue, in which the most important records are written.

Of other systems of writing, chiefly pictorial, known in the ancient world, such as the Hittite and the Cypriot--or, again, of the picture-writing of many other savage tribes beside the North American Indians, it is not necessary to speak. For we are not writing a history of alphabets, but of the acquisition of the _art_ of writing by mankind.