TWENTY-THIRD ORDINARY MEETJNG. 289 



columns, and on the walls of temples and tombs. The second and 

 third forms were used on the papyrus rolls, were merely cursive 

 forms of the Hieroglyphic, and were employed when education 

 became more common among the masses of the Egyptians. 



Generally it may be stated the most ancient form of writing among 

 the Egyptians was symbolic, that is, certain forms were employed to 

 represent specific objects. At that time their language was in the 

 same stage as that of the Aborigines of this continent, whose pictorial 

 repi-esentations are yet visible in parts of Canada, or of the Aborigines 

 of Mexico, who, to some extent, employed the same method, and who 

 probably would have reached in time a phonetic stage in their 

 language, when the same or other forms would have conveyed their 

 ideas and the names and qualities of objects. 



This stage of human language is a primitive one, and dates back 

 to the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires, whose annals 

 are recorded in the cuneiform on the clay bricks and stone cylinders 

 found in the libraries and ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. Its pro- 

 genitor, the Accadian, seems to have been a hieroglyphic language 

 in which specific forms represented an idea or an object. The 

 Assyrians, the successors of the Accadians, attached phonetic values 

 to the forms, and perhaps modified them into the cuneiform as now 

 found on the monuments in the British and other museums. As an 

 example of this change let us take the word for sun. Its primitive 

 Accadian form was as nearly circular as straight sti^okes would 

 admit. The Assyrians changed the form into a perpendicular line, 

 preceded by two lines at an angle, attached a phonetic value and 

 pronounced it samse. In Egyptian the form to denote the sun was 

 a circle "With a dot in the centre. Afterwards, when the phonetic 

 stage was reached, the phonetic value of ra was given to it, and the 

 original form was placed as a determinative after the phonetic signs 

 ■employed to express the syllable ra. 



The Egyptian Hieroglyphic forms were occasionally used figura. 

 tively. In some instances we can easily trace the figurative meaning 

 of any particular form from the literal ; in others this is impossible, 

 the figurative meaning having been imposed arbitrarily, or at least 

 the connection between them is not now perceptible. The circle 

 which denotes "sun" signifies also "day" in many of the texts, 

 though not the usual word. The connection here is quite obvious. 

 The sun-god was supposed to sail across the sky in his boat, and then 



