MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
sort of thing that went on, century after century and 
millenium after millenium, through the whole long course 
of man’s existence on the globe, down to a relatively very 
short time ago. If events and discoveries and facts of all 
kinds are better remembered today than ever before, it 1s 
entirely due to the art of writing. 
To this day many peoples look upon writing as some- 
thing uncanny or magical. We may smile at the story of 
the native sent by a missionary to a friend, with a note and 
a basket of fruit, who sat on the former eile he ate the 
latter, so that the mysterious “‘writing”’ could not see what 
he did and tell on him. But that is just how early man 
looked at it. 
Pictographs, or actual pictures of concrete objects, like 
men, animals, or plants, seem to have been the first step 
in the infinitely slow development of writing. Next came 
symbolic representation. A star, for example, might stand 
for a god; a battle-ax, for a king; three wavy lines, for 
water; and so on. Then the earlier pictures, gradually 
simplified out of all likeness to the things they originally 
stood for, became themselves symbols. Thus, to indicate 
an ox, people would no longer draw a picture of the whole 
animal but merely a sketch of its head—a triangle with 
two lines projecting from the upper corners for the horns. 
If a wild bull was intended, in the triangle would be drawn 
three sharp peaks, the symbol for a mountain, and 1 
would then mean “‘a mountain bull.’ We call characters 
of this sort not pictographs but ideographs, because they 
are no longer pictorial, but represent ideas. 
The next great step was to make these symbols stand 
not only for ideas but also in some cases for sounds. This 
seems to have been accomplished through a method like 
that used in the rebuses which we used to solve as children. 
The sentence, “I see you,” to take a very simple example, 
might be indicated by a picture of a human eye followed 
by one of the sea and then the letter U. In other words, a 
symbol which originally stood for one thing would be used 
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