100 PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 



proper names and foreign words, is sufficient to sliow that they 

 had started on the road which led the Egyptians to a system of 

 syllabic, and to some extent of alphabetic writing. There is 

 even evidence that the Maya nation of Yucatan, the ruins of 

 whose temples and palaces are so well known from the tra- 

 vels of Catherwood and Stephens, not only had a system of 

 phonetic writing, but used it for wi'iting ordinary words and 

 sentences. A Spanish MS., '^Relacion de las Cosas de Yu- 

 catan,' bearing the date of 1561, and the name of Diego de 

 Landa, Bishop of Merida, has just been published by the Abbe 

 Brasseur,^ and contains not only a set of chronological signs 

 resembling the figures of the Central American sculptures and 

 the Dresden Codex, but a list of over thirty characters, some 

 alphabetic, as a, i, m, n; some syllabic, as Im, ti; and a sen- 

 tence, ma in Tcati, " I will not," written with them. The 

 genuineness of this information, and its bearing on the inter- 

 pretation of the inscriptions on the monuments, are, of course, 

 matters for future investigation. 



Yet another people, the Chinese, made the advance from 

 pictures to phonetic wi'iting, and it was pei'haps because of 

 the peculiar character of their spoken language that they did 

 it in so different a way. The whole history of their art of 

 writing still lies open to us. They began by drawing the 

 plainest outlines of sun, moon, tortoise, fish, boy, hatchet, tree, 

 dog, and so forth, and thus forming characters which are still 

 extant, and are known as the Ku-wan, or " ancient pictures."^ 

 Such pictures, though so much altered that, were not their 

 ancient forms still to be seen, it would hardly be safe to say they 

 had ever been pictures at all, are still used to some extent in 

 Chinese writing, as in the characters for man, sun, moon, tree, 

 etc. There are also combined pictorial signs, as water and eye 

 for " tears," and other kinds of purely symbolic characters. But 

 the great mass of characters at present in use are double, con- 

 sisting of two signs, one for sound, the other for sense. They 



* Brasseur, ' Relation des Glioses de Yucatan de Diego de Landa,' etc. ; Paris 

 and London, 1864. 



^ J. M. Gallery, ' Systema Phoneticum Scripturse Smicse,' part i. ; Macao, 1841, 

 p. 29. Endliclier, Ghin. Gramm., p. 3, etc. 



