II.] HISTORIC TIMES AND PEOPLES. 



although possessing phonetic value, mainly express full syllables, 

 scarcely ever letters, and rarely complete words. Ideographs had 

 given place first to phonograms and then to mere syllables, 

 "complex syllables in which several consonants may be dis- 

 tinguished, or simple syllables composed of only one consonant 

 and one vowel or vice versa V 



The Egyptians, on the other hand, carried the system right 

 through the whole gamut from pictures to letters, but retained all 

 the intermediate phases, the initial tending to fall away, the final 

 to expand, while the bulk of the hieroglyphs represented in various 

 degrees the several transitional states. In many cases they " had 

 kept only one part of the syllable, namely a mute consonant ; 

 they detached, for instance, the final u from bu and pu, and 



gave only the values b and / to the human leg and to the 



mat g . The peoples of the Euphrates stopped half way, and 

 admitted actual letters for the vowel sounds , i and u only 2 ." 



In the process of evolution, metaphor and analogy of course 

 played a large part, as in the evolution of language itself. Thus 

 a lion might stand both for the animal and for courage, and so on. 

 The first essays in phonetics took somewhat the form of a modern 

 rebus, thus : O = khau = sieve, H =pu = mat ; <r^> = ru = mouth, 



whence O H := kho-pi-ru = to be, where the sounds and not the 



meaning of the several components are alone attended to 3 . 



By analogous processes was formed a true alphabet, in which, 

 however, each of the phonetic elements was repre- 

 sented at first by several different characters derived 

 from several different words having the same initial syllable. 

 Here was, therefore, an embarras de richesses, which could be got 

 rid of only by a judicious process of elimination, that is, by dis- 

 carding all like-sounding symbols but one for the same sound. 

 When this final process of reduction was completed by the scribes, 

 in other words, when all the phonetic signs were rejected except 

 23, i.e., one for each of the 23 phonetic elements, the Phoe- 

 nician alphabet as we now have it was completed. Such may 



1 Maspero, op. '/., p. 728. - Ibid. 3 Tbid. p. 233. 



