THE AGE OF BRONZE 
to mean something else having a similar sound but an 
entirely different meaning. Some forms of writing never 
got much beyond this, but remained an inconsistent even 
though systematized combination of pictographs, idéo- 
graphs, and sound symbols. Chinese script is essentially 
an instance of this kind. 
In other forms the principle of indicating sounds instead 
of ideas or objects gained ground, until there resulted a set 
of signs, each standing for a definite syllable—a vowel 
alone or a consonant and vowel. We call such a system 
a syllabary. The ancient Assyrians used it in part, as do 
also the modern Japanese. 
The best system, because the simplest and most flexible, 
is the alphabet. Here the symbols stand for sounds and 
sounds alone, every consonant and finally every vowel 
having its own separate sign. But this development came 
only comparatively late in man’s history, after he had 
passed through an extended period of experimenting with 
picture-writing, with ideographs, and then with halting 
attempts at representing sounds alone. 
But long before the invention of the alphabet, man had 
begun to keep records. Although he had already long 
used a few very simple systems of writing, the dawn of 
history may be said to have occurred during the Age of 
Bronze. 
The Mother Goddess of fertility and growth, the divin- 
ity characteristic of certain regions in the New Stone Age, 
gradually gave place during the masculine and warlike 
Bronze Age to the Sun or Sky God. The latter seems at 
first to have been represented only rarely if at all by im- 
ages in human form, but rather by symbols, particularly 
the wheel and the swastika, and also by forms of the cross 
and representations of ships and of chariots, sometimes 
themselves bearing the sacred symbol of the wheel. 
Human sacrifice, although still quite generally practiced, 
appears to have become less a magical rite to insure a 
plentiful harvest than an act of propitiation to turn away 
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