136 REPORT—1857. 
him that the inventors of cuneatic writing were acquainted with hieroglyphic writing, 
was that ideographic characters were mixed with phonetic ones in both the systems. 
This alone, however, would not prove that this was the case; for ideographic cha- 
racters are mixed with phonetic ones in almost all systems. The Arabic and Roman 
numerals, the signs for degrees, minutes and seconds, and for the different denomi- 
nations of money and the like, are ideographic. These have not been borrowed from 
either the Assyrian or the Egyptian system ; why then should it be thought that one of 
these was borrowed from the other? Unless the ideographs were introduced among the 
phonographs in a strikingly similar manner in the two systems, it would by no means 
follow that one system was taken from the other. The author, however, denied that 
they were introduced in a similar manner. The Egyptians sometimes wrote the name 
of an object phonetically, and added the figure or symbol of the object; but the 
Assyrians never did so. They wrote down the word or they wrote down the sign ; 
but they never wrote down both, one after the other. At other times, the Egyptians 
wrote the name of an object phonetically, and wrote after it the ideograph, not of 
the object, but of the species or genus to which it belonged. The Assyrians did 
something like this, but not this. They prefixed the ideographic sign of the species 
to the name of the individual, or that of the genus to the name of the species. They 
prefixed what the Egyptians postfixed. Surely, if they had learned the use of deter- 
minative signs from the Egyptians, they would have used them as the Egyptians did. 
Again, compound ideographs are used in Egyptian writing ; but though there appear 
to be instances of the use of them in Assyrian writing, these are capable of a differ- 
ent explanation, which is probably the true one. In fig. 2, we have a combination 
of two characters, which signifies “‘a son;’’ the characters signifying severally 
“child” and “male.’”’ Sir Henry Rawlinson has, however, suggested that these 
characters, which have the phonetic values tu and us, represent words of the Acca- 
dian language to which the cuneatic writing was first applied. These Accadian 
words, when alone, are interchanged with the equivalent Assyrian words which are 
beneath them in the figure, being written when those Assyrian words should be 
read; and in like manner the compound Accadian word Tur-us, ‘‘a male child,” is 
written when the equivalent Assyrian word pal should be read. This Accadian 
compound is interchanged with a simple Accadian word for ‘‘ son,”’ which was pro- 
bably pronounced hwah; both Accadian forms being equally read as pal. A great 
deal of the supposed ideographic writing of the Assyrians is thus, in fact, a writing 
down of Accadian words, when the equivalent Assyrian words are to be read; a 
mode of proceeding which was certainly not learned from the Egyptians, who prac- 
tised nothing at all like it. Strange as this mode of proceeding must appear, and as 
it certainly is, it has some resemblance to what occurs in English. Abbreviations 
are frequently used, which represent Latin words, and which are nevertheless read 
by English words. Thus ‘‘ £”’ represents ‘‘ libre,” but is read ‘‘ pounds ;” “e.g.” 
represents “‘exempli gratia,’ but is read ‘‘for example.” It thus appears that so 
far as respects their use of ideographs, there is very little resemblance between the 
Assyrian and Egyptian systems of writing; certainly not enough to require us to 
attribute to them a common origin. Let us now look to the forms and values of the 
characters. In both systems we have representations of ‘the mouth” and of 
“* water ;” but they are as unlike as it would be possible to make them (see fig. 3). 
The Egyptians represented the mouth as seen in front, the Assyrians as seen from 
the side; the wedges represent the lips, the line of the face, and the mouth itself. 
The Assyrians represented water by drops of rain; the Egyptians by the waved sur- 
face of standing water. Surely there would. not have been such differences if one 
system had been taken from the other. Again, the Egyptian characters for the most 
part represented incomplete syllables, requiring vowels to be supplied which were 
not expressed ; whereas the Assyrian characters all represented complete or definite 
syllables, in which no vowels had to be supplied. The Egyptian syllabic characters 
differed in another respect from the Assyrian ones. They admitted complementary 
letters, as they are called ; sometimes before them, sometimes after them, and some- 
times both before and after them; while the Assyrian characters had no comple- 
ments. To show the nature of the complementary characters of the Egyptians, and 
at the same time the uncertainty.of their writing, owing to the absence of vowels, 
two syllabic characters are given in figures 4 and 5, with the variations of which the 
