PICTOKrAL GEKMS OF LANGrAGE. 19 



ninphs of the god-king, the submission of his subjects, and 

 the punishment of the rebelUous. And yet again they were 

 governmental, as being the products of an art reverenced 

 by the people as a sacred mystery. From the habitual use 

 of this pictorial representation there naturally grew up the 

 but slightly-modified practice of picture-writing — a practice 

 which was found still extant among the Mexicans at the time 

 they were discovered. By abbreviations analogous to those 

 still going on in our own written and spoken language, the 

 most familiar of these pictured figures were successively sim- 

 plified ; and ultimately there grew up a system of symbols, 

 most of M hich had but a distant resemblance to the things 

 for which they stood. The inference that the hieroglyphics 

 of the Egyptians were thus produced, is confirmed by the 

 fact that the picture-writing of the Mexicans Avas found to 

 have given birth to a like family of ideographic forms ; and 

 among them, as among the Egyptians, these had been par- 

 tially differentiated into the kuriological or imitative, and 

 the tropical or symbolic : which w^ere, however, used to- 

 gether in the same record. In Egypt, written language 

 underwent a further differentiation : whence resulted the 

 hieratic and the epist olographic or enchorial: both of which 

 are derived from the original hieroglyphic. At the same 

 time we find that for the ex^^ression of proper names which 

 could not be otherwise conveyed, phonetic symbols were 

 employed ; and though it is alleged that the Egyptians 

 never actually achieved complete alphabetic writing, yet it 

 can scarcely be doubted that these phonetic symbols occa- 

 fiioually used in aid of their ideograj^hic ones, were the 

 germs out of which alphabetic writing grew. Once having 

 become separate from hieroglyphics, alphabetic writing it- 

 self underwent numerous differentiations — multiplied alpha- 

 bets were produced; between most of which, however, mere 

 or less connection can still be traced. And m each civil- 

 ized nation there has now grown up, for the representation 



