Brinton.J °UU [Oct. 1, 



monosyllabic signs were derived from the initial and the accented 

 syllables of the homophones ; and the alphabet, so-called, but never 

 recognized as such, by the Egyptians, either from monoliteral 

 words, or from initial sounds. At no period of ancient Egyptian 

 history was one sound constantly represented by one sign. In the 

 so-called Egyptian alphabet, there are four quite different signs 

 for the 31, four for the T, thpee for the N, and so on. This is 

 obviously owing to the independent derivation of these phonetic 

 elements from different figures employed ikonomatically. 



There are other peculiarities in the Egyptian script, which are 

 to be explained by the same historic reason. For instance, cer- 

 tain phonetic signs can be used only in definite combinations ; 

 others must be assigned fixed positions, as at the beginning or 

 at the end of a group ; and, in other cases, two or more different 

 signs, with the same phonetic value, follow one another, the 

 scribe thinking that if the reader was not acquainted with one, he 

 would be with the other. I note these peculiarities, because they 

 may be expected to recur in other systems of ikonomatic 

 writing, and may serve as hints in interpreting them. 



Evidently, one of the earliest stimuli to the development of pho- 

 netics was the wish to record proper names, which in themselves 

 nad no definite signification, such as those drawn from a foreign 

 language, orthose which had lost through time their original sense. 

 In savage conditions every proper name is significant; but in 

 conditions of social life, as developed as that of the Egyptians of 

 the earliest dynasties, and as that of the Mayas and Mexicans in 

 the New World, there are found many names without meaning 

 in the current tongue. These could not be represented by any 

 mode of picture writing. To be recorded at all, the}' must be 

 written phonetically; and to accomplish this the most obvious 

 plan was to select objects whose names had a similar sound, and 

 by portra3 T ing the latter, represent to the ear the former. The 

 Greek names, Alexander and Alexandria, occurring on the Rosetta 

 Stone, were wholly meaningless to the Egyptian ear ; but their 

 scribes succeeded in expressing them very nearly by a series of 

 signs which in origin are rebuses. 



This inception of the ikonomatic method, in the effort to ex- 

 press phonetically proper names, is admirably illustrated in 

 mediaeval heraldry. Veiy earl}' in the history of armorial bear- 



