ANCIENT EGYPT. I3I 



This statue bears the marks of having been broken in pieces 

 by damped wooden wedges, the process already referred to 

 as having been used in the detachment of obehsks. We may 

 attribute its destruction to the fanaticism of the early 

 Christians, who wantonly laid waste everything in the temples 

 within their reach. 



Forms of Writing. 



Articulate language was in all probability itself preceded 

 by symbolic or picture writing, which would naturally take 

 the forms of objects in nature and of those in common use, 

 more especially in its earlier stages. The origin of Egyptian 

 hieroglyphs, literally sacred sculptures, was pictorial, like the 

 writing of the Chinese ; and like that of Babylonia, which 

 degenerated from the picture writing of the Accadians into 

 the cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters. 



The Ancient Egyptians were assisted in every sentence 

 by a " determinative," which summary, however, was but 

 sparingly used during the earlier dynasties. As far as is 

 known, or at all events as far as we can go back, pure 

 hieroglyphics were employed mainly on the monuments. 



The oldest descriptions found up to recently date from 

 about B.C. 4,500, and they contain some alphabetic characters. 

 These inscriptions occur on the stelae of Shera, which are 

 preserved at Geezeh and Oxford. Last year Petrie found the 

 polychromic vase at Abydos, already mentioned under the 

 heading " The Monuments " with the name of Menes upon it ; 

 this carrying back the art of writing to the beginning of the 

 first known dynasty some seventy centuries ago — how long it 

 took to reach this stage we know not, but it would appear to 

 have been already then very far removed from infancy, and is 

 suggestive of a long long past, for the first signs must have 

 been purely symbolic, and in the earliest inscriptions yet found 

 there is already something more. Now that grammars have 

 been prepared for the use of students, the work of study has 

 become less laborious, and indeed the hieroglyphic form of 

 caligraphy is hardly more difficult to read, word for word, 



