14. Prehistoric writing in India and Europe. 
By PANCHANAN Metra, M.A., F.R.A.I. Lecturer, Calcutta 
University. 
@’Azil he first of all pointed out clearly that such studies 
pertain to the forms and not to the values of letters.' * It would 
be wrong to think that in holding these comparisons I am deal- 
ing with the sounds which might have been represented by the 
Be a 8 umerous modifications were introduced in the 
phonetic sense of the characters and we have not sufficient 
only for such a history.” Elsewhere he. dwells on the picto- 
graphic and symbolic stages which were both ideographic 
and phonetic, from which was gradually evolved a syllabary 
and finally an alphabetic script.» But he is seen at his — 
in his classic essay on ‘ Les Keritures de l’age glyptique. 
where the history of prehistoric signs is traced back to the 
reindeer-epoch of palaeolithic France. The examples brought 
forward there are not merely isolated as in the Azilian galets 
but contain two inscriptions, one from La Madeleine and the 
The human groups 
provided with different mentalities have not matured at the 
same time by the formation of a script. It is this glyptic me 
devoted first to the fine arts that would be the first to evolve 
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| Piette, Etudes d’ethnographie préhistorique, L’Anthropologie 
1896, p. 414, ~ : ' 
: "Piette, Bulletins dela Société d’Anthropologie de Paris 1897, p. 285. 
’ L’ Anthropologie, 1905. 
