TWENTY-THIRD ORDINARY MEETING. 289 
columns, and on the walls of temples and tombs. The second and 
third forms were used on the papyrus rolls, were merely cursive 
forms of the Hieroglyphic, and were employed when education 
became more common among the masses of the Egyptians. 
Generally it may be stated the most ancient form of writing among 
the Egyptians was symbolic, that is, certain forms were employed to 
represent specific objects. At that time their language was in the 
same stage as that of the Aborigines of this continent, whose pictorial 
representations are yet visible in parts of Canada, or of the Aborigines 
of Mexico, who, to some extent, employed the same method, and who 
probably would have reached in time a phonetic stage in their 
language, when the same or other forms would have conveyed their 
ideas and the names and qualities of objects. 
This stage of human language is a primitive one, and dates back 
to the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires, whose annals 
are recorded in the cuneiform on the clay bricks and stone cylinders 
found in the libraries and ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. Its pro- 
genitor, the Accadian, seems to have been a hieroglyphic language 
in which specific forms represented an idea or an object. The 
Assyrians, the successors of the Accadians, attached phonetic values 
to the forms, and perhaps modified them into the cuneiform as now 
found on the monuments in the British and other museums. As an 
example of this change let us take the word for sun. Its primitive 
Accadian form was as nearly circular as straight strokes would 
admit. The Assyrians changed the form into a perpendicular line, 
preceded by two lines at an angle, attached a phonetic value and 
pronounced it sumse. In Egyptian the form to denote the sun was 
a circle with a dot in the centre. Afterwards, when the phonetic 
stage was reached, the phonetic value of ra was given to it, and the 
original form was placed as a determinative after the phonetic signs 
employed to express the syllable ra. 
The Egyptian Hieroglyphic forms were occasionally used figura- 
tively. In some instances we can easily trace the figurative meaning 
of any particular form from the literal ; in others this is impossible, 
the figurative meaning having been imposed arbitrarily, or at least 
the connection between them is not now perceptible. The circle 
which denotes “sun” signifies also “day” in many of the texts, 
though not the usual word. The connection here is quite obvious. 
The sun-god was supposed to sail across the sky in his boat, and then 
