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hearing, a bee for industry, 2 woman and her son for the verb to 
love. It isthe same in all early attempts at language. In Mexican, 
a man sitting on the ground represents an earthquake. We have 
thus arrived at a symbolical language. It plays an important part 
in Egyptian hieroglyphics, where a man holding a stick signifies 
Sorce, two legs, motion, &c. 
From the expression of abstract thoughts the next great 
step was to the expression of sounds—phonograms. Thus, the 
name of lapis lazuli, being pronounced in Egyptian, is khersteb ; 
and khersf being the verb “to stop,” and “teb” a pig, a man 
holding a pig by the tail was a phonetic representation of the 
word khersteb. In the process of the analysis of sound it was 
next discovered that all words might be compounded of a certain 
number of syllables, and certain signs of things were taken to 
represent syllables. Several languages never passed beyond this 
stage. It was reserved for the Egyptians as far as we are able 
to judge to take the next great step, to phonetism; that is, to 
adopt signs to represent only sounds. Let us see how they 
accomplished this step. An eagle was called ahom—the sound A. 
being dominant, the figure of an eagle was made to stand for A. 
The mouth being called ro the figure of a mouth came to repre- 
sent the sound &. Similarly a lion stood for Z, and an owl for 
M. In all languages of comparatively uncivilized peoples the 
consonants are dominant, and the vowels with the exception of a 
only play an important part, later. 
The Egyptians had three forms of written language, the 
hieroglyphics mainly sculptured on stone, the hieratic used by 
the priests on papyrus, and the cursive used generally for writing. 
The figures of the animals mentioned could not be drawn in 
rapid writing, and modifications of them were consequently 
adopted. 
Strange as it may seem, the papyri unearthed from Egyptian 
tombs enable us to trace how our A has sprung from the figure of 
an eagle, our M from that of an owl, and our Y from that of the 
horned viper of Egypt. 
