A Story Outline of Evolution 



be made to express the myriad experiences of the human 

 race. It is to these pictures, however, that we must look to 

 the origin of the complicated systems of expressing thoughts 

 in a visible and lasting shape so as to make them intelligible. 

 As human experience broadened, picture writing gave way 

 to phonetic writing, where the characters employed denote 

 the spoken word or its elements, either syllables or single 

 sounds, such as vowels or consonants. These picture writ- 

 ings were blended into symbols and signs which were at first 

 ony conventionalized pictures. The Sumerlans Invented the 

 cuneiform system of writing and this system was soon 

 adopted by all the leading nations of Western Asia. This 

 system of writing, likewise, originated In pictographs. It is 

 a combination of Idlograms, syllabic signs and vestiges of 

 the picture writings that preceded It. 



Necessity demanded and called into use a more definite 

 and specific means of expression which led to the Invention 

 of an alphabet. 



[58] 



