A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



recent excavations had ceased to have that pictorial 

 aspect which distinguishes the Egyptian script. What 

 had originally been pictures of objects fish, houses, 

 and the like had come to be represented by mere 

 aggregations of wedge-shaped marks. As the writing 

 of the Babylonians was chiefly inscribed on soft clay, 

 the adaptation of this wedge-shaped mark in lieu of 

 an ordinary line was probably a mere matter of con- 

 venience, since the sharp-cornered implement used in 

 making the inscription naturally made a wedge-shaped 

 impression in the clay. That, however, is a detail. 

 The essential thing is that the Babylonian had so 

 fully analyzed the speech-sounds that he felt entire 

 confidence in them, and having selected a sufficient 

 number of conventional characters each made up of 

 wedge-shaped lines to represent all the phonetic 

 sounds of his language, spelled the words out in 

 syllables and to some extent dispensed with the 

 determinative signs which, as we have seen, played so 

 prominent a part in the Egyptian writing. His 

 cousins the Assyrians used habitually a system of 

 writing the foundation of which was an elaborate 

 phonetic syllabary; a system, therefore, far removed 

 from the old crude pictograph, and in some respects 

 much more developed than the complicated Egyptian 

 method ; yet, after all, a system that stopped short of 

 perfection by the wide gap that separates the syllabary 

 from the true alphabet. 



A brief analysis of speech sounds will aid us in un- 

 derstanding the real nature of the syllabary. Let us 

 take for consideration the consonantal sound repre- 

 sented by the letter b. A moment's consideration will 



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