178 PICTURE-WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. 
and twice as wide, and excavating there two contiguous caves, which are wide at 
the mouth and end in a point, making two triangular niches polished on their four 
faces. On the two outer fronts to the left and right appear more than 60 symbols or 
hieroglyphs, written in a simple and rustic way with the index finger of a rude hand, 
and with a reddish bituminous pigment. The niches, about a yard and a half in 
height, 1 yard deep, and half a yard at the mouth, are covered by the exceedingly 
hard and immense rock of the mountain. There is formed, as it were, a vestibule or 
esplanade before the monument, and it is defended by a rampart made of the rocks 
torn from the niches, strengthened with juniper, oaks, and cork trees. The half- 
moon, the sun, an ax, a bow and arrows, an ear of corn, a heart, a tree, two human 
figures, and a head with a crown stand out among those signs, the foreshadowings of 
primitive writing. 
The inscription on the first triangular faee of the second cave is 
reproduced here as the left-hand group of the upper part of Fig. 1108, 
infra, and that ‘on the outer plane to the right, which already turns 
pyramidally to the north,” is reproduced as the right-hand group of the 
same figure. They are inserted at that place for convenient compari- 
son with other characters on the figure mentioned and with those in 
Figs. 1097 and 1107. 
ITALY. 
Mr. Moggridge (in Jour. Anthrop. Inst. Gr. Br. and I., vit, p. 65) 
observes that one of the designs, g, reported by Dr. Von Haast from 
New Zealand (see Fig. 133), was the same as one which had been seen on 
rocks 6,900 feet above the sea in the northwest corner of Italy. He adds: 
The inscriptions are not in colors, as are those given in Dr. Von Haast’s paper, but 
are made by the repeated dots of a sharp pointed instrument. It is probable that if 
we knew how to read them they might convey important information, since the same 
signs occur in different combinations, just as the letters of our alphabet recur in 
different combinations to form words. Without the whole of these figures we can 
not say whether the same probability applies to them. 
SECTION 4. 
AFRICA. 
The following examples are selected from the large number of petro- 
glyphs known to have been discovered in Africa apart from those in 
Egypt, which are more immediately connected with the first use of 
syllabaries and alphabets, with symbolism and with gesture signs, un- 
der which headings some examples of the Egyptian hieroglyphies ap- 
pear in this work. 
ALGERIA. 
In the Revue Géographique Internationale (a) is a communication _ 
upon the rock inscriptions at Tyout (Fig. 140) and Moghar (Fig. 141) 
translated, with some condensation, as follows: 
On the last military expedition made in the Sahara Gen. Colonieu made a careful 
restoration of the inscriptions on the rocks, whose existence was discovered at Tyout 
and Moghar. At Tyout these inscriptions are engraved on red or Vosgian sandstone, 
thes thee 
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