PRIMITIVE BOOKS 



tal, uniformly from left to right, and that each finds its 

 prototype in the varied scripts of old Egypt. 



As regards the incidental aids to reading supplied by 

 the separation of words from one another, the use of 

 punctuation marks, of capitals, and of division into 

 paragraphs, ancient writings, with very few exceptions, 

 show a striking uniformity. To each and all of them, 

 these expedients are quite unknown. The so-called 

 determinatives at the end of Egyptian and Babylonian 

 words give to the practised eye a clue that is equivalent 

 to the space which we moderns always leave between 

 words; but to the casual inspector of the writing, the 

 signs and symbols appear to run on in an unbroken 

 sequence. There is nothing to indicate where one word 

 ends and the other begins. Neither is there any varia- 

 tion in the type of letter to suggest the beginning of a 

 sentence, or any mark of punctuation to indicate the 

 end of a sentence or a shift in the phrase of thought. 

 In short, the characters making up the text run on 

 in an unbroken phalanx, from top to bottom of the page, 

 and the better the manuscript is as a work of art, the 

 more uniform and unvarying is the distribution of its 

 characters. This applies, not merely to the oriental 

 writings, but to the early Greek manuscripts as well. It 

 is very puzzling, even to a person with a fair knowledge 

 of the language, to attempt to decipher one of these con- 

 tinuous scripts. Doubtless the readers of the time, 

 having, of course, a perfect familiarity with their lan- 

 guage, found no difficulty in reading such a script. Yet 

 the real embarrassments that hamper such a system will 

 be evident to anyone who will have the most familiar 



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