II.] HISTORIC TIMES AND PEOPLES. 25 



discovered the medicinal properties of plants, wrote treatises on 

 diseases and their remedies, studied astrology and astronomy, and 

 appointed "the Five Observers of the heavenly bodies." 



But this epoch had been preceded by the " Age of the Three 

 [sixj Rulers," when people lived in caves, ate wild fruits and 

 uncooked food, drank the blood of animals and wore the skins of 

 wild beasts (our Old Stone Age). Later they grew less rude, 

 learned to obtain fire by friction, and built themselves habitations 

 of wood or foliage (our early Neolithic Age). Thus is everywhere 

 revealed the background of sheer savagery, which lies behind all 

 human culture, while the " Golden Age " of the poets fades with 

 the " Hesperides " and Plato's "Atlantis" into the region of the 

 fabulous. 



Little need here be said of strictly historic times, the most 

 characteristic feature of which is perhaps the general 

 use of letters. By means of this most fruitful of f^^ nc 

 human inventions, everything worth preserving was 

 perpetuated, and thus all useful knowledge tended to become 

 accumulative. It is no longer possible to say when or where the 

 miracle was wrought by which the apparently multifarious sounds 

 of fully-developed languages were exhaustively analysed and 

 effectively expressed by a score or so of arbitrary signs. But 

 a comparative study of the various writing-systems in use in 

 different parts of the world has revealed the process by which the 

 transition was gradually brought about from rude pictorial repre- 

 sentations of objects to purely phonetical symbols. 



As is clearly shown by the "winter counts " of the North Ameri- 

 can aborigines, and by the prehistoric rock carvings 



J Evolution 



in Upper Egypt, the first step was a pictography the of writing 

 actual figure, say, of a man, standing for a given 

 man, and then for any man or human being. Then this figure, 

 more or less reduced or conventionalised, served to indicate not 

 only the term man, but the full sound man, as in the word 

 manifest, and in the modern rebus. At this stage it becomes 

 a phonogram, or phonoglyph, which, when further reduced beyond 

 all recognition of its original form, may stand for the syllable ma 

 as in ma-ny, without any further reference either to the idea 

 or the sound man. The phonogram has now become the symbol 



