A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



could be reproduced rephonated by some one who 

 had never heard the words and did not know in ad- 

 vance what this written record contained. This, of 

 course, is what every child learns to do now in the 

 primer class, but we may feel assured that such an idea 

 never occurred to any human being until the peculiar 

 forms of pictographic writing just referred to had 

 been practised for many centuries. Yet, as we have 

 said, some genius of prehistoric Egypt conceived the 

 idea and put it into practical execution, and the 

 hieroglyphic writing of which the Egyptians were in 

 full possession at the very beginning of what we term 

 the historical period made use of this phonetic system 

 along with the ideographic system already described. 



So fond were the Egyptians of their pictorial sym- 

 bols used ideographically that they clung to them 

 persistently throughout the entire period of Egyptian 

 history. They used symbols as phonetic equivalents 

 very frequently, but they never learned to depend 

 upon them exclusively. The scribe always inter- 

 spersed his phonetic signs with some other signs in- 

 tended as graphic aids. After spelling a word out in 

 full, he added a picture, sometimes even two or three 

 pictures, representative of the individual thing, or at 

 least of the type of thing to which the word belongs. 

 Two or three illustrations will make this clear. 



Thus qeften, monkey, is spelled out in full, but the 

 picture of a monkey is added as a determinative ; 

 second, qenu, cavalry, after being spelled, is made un- 

 equivocal by the introduction of a picture of a horse ; 

 third, temati, wings, though spelled elaborately, has 

 pictures of wings added ; and fourth, tatu, quadrupeds, 



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