A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



In point of fact, such a work as Professor Delitzsch's 

 Assyrian Grammar 6 presents signs for three hundred 

 and thirty-four syllables, together with sundry alterna- 

 tive signs and determinatives to tax the memory of 

 the would-be reader of Assyrian. Let us take for 

 example a few of the b sounds. It has been explained 

 that the basis of the Assyrian written character is a 

 simple wedge-shaped or arrow-head mark. Variously 

 repeated and grouped, these marks make up the syl- 

 labic characters. 



To learn some four hundred such signs as these 

 was the task set, as an equivalent of learning the 

 a b c's, to any primer class in old Assyria in the long 

 generations when that land was the culture centre of 

 the world. Nor was the task confined to the natives 

 of Babylonia and Assyria alone. About the fifteenth 

 century B.C., and probably for a long time before and 

 after that period, the exceedingly complex syllabary 

 of the Babylonians was the official means of com- 

 munication throughout western Asia and between Asia 

 and Egypt, as we know from the chance discovery 

 of a collection of letters belonging to the Egyptian 

 king Khun-aten, preserved at Tel-el- Amarna. In the 

 time of Ramses the Great the Babylonian writing was 

 in all probability considered by a majority of the 

 most highly civilized people in the world to be the 

 most perfect script practicable. Doubtless the aver^ 

 age scribe of the time did not in the least realize the 

 waste of energy involved in his labors, or ever suspect 

 that there could be any better way of writing. 



Yet the analysis of any one of these hundreds of 

 syllables into its component phonetic elements had 



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