WRITING 



3 6 7 



with a pencil and Indian ink, and were later on adopted in 

 a modified form by the Japanese. The Mesopotamians, the 

 ancient Persians and the Armenians changed their early hiero- 

 glyphs into cuneiform characters (Fig. 188), which consist of 

 straight lines drawn at one end to a point, (and arranged either 

 horizontally with the broader end to the left or else vertically 

 with the broader end at the top. Exceptionally they are 

 oblique, with the broader end either above or below. Thus by 

 means of repeating the signs, placing them either next to or over 

 one another and crossing them, a number of complicated figures 

 were obtained. They were engraved on stone with wedge- 

 shaped chisels, or 



moulded in wet clay ' * A * o , - 



with wedge - shaped 

 sticks. 



On European soil 

 it was in Crete that 

 the inhabitants of 

 the vEgean Islands 

 first changed the 

 hieroglyphs which 

 had been in use for 

 hundreds of years 

 into a regular sys- 

 tem of writing, which 

 differed from that of 



the Cypriots in that FIG. 188. Example of the arrangement of the lines 

 in an ancient Babylonian inscription. (Karpeles.) 



each sign stood for 



a sound only, and not for a syllable. The main foundation 

 for a practical system of writing was, however, laid by the 

 Phoenicians, who formulated an alphabet of twenty-two char- 

 acters, containing consonants and semi-consonants and written 

 from right to left. From this was developed the early Semitic 

 writing, and this again was the mother of the Greek, in which 

 the alphabet was increased from twenty-two to twenty-six 

 characters. 



The Italian peoples (and perhaps even earlier the Etruscans) 

 obtained their alphabet in an altered form from the Greeks, 

 and the Celts derived theirs partly from the Greeks and partly 



