BY HENRY TRYON. 



51 



Genesis x. v. 1-32, where as Peschel remarks "a system of 

 Ethnography of the Mediterranean nations is sketched, in which 

 names of countries, nations, or towns, are attributed to fictitious 

 heads of families." (Op. cit. p.494) 



Facts of to day are, in a sense, the most ancient history," 

 and the value of recording engravings such as these will, I think, 

 be allowed when their place is assigned amongst the various 

 stages which written speech has gone through in arriving at its 

 present state of multiform expression {cf Herbert Spencer on 

 *' Progress " Op. Cit. vol. i, page 18). They are briefly these 

 which may be grouped under the titles, I Non-Phonetic, II, Sub- 

 Phonetic, and III, Phonetic. 



I. Non-Phonetic includes (i) Pictographs or imitative signs, a 

 class with numerous examples in the rock engravings and paintings 

 throughout Australia. The mural paintings of early Egyptian 

 and Assyrian monuments also belong, according to some author- 

 ities, to this class. With some races it is long obsolete, others 

 recent. 



(2) Ideographs, or expression by conventional signs. This 

 is immediately derived from the first class as a higher stage, or is 

 itself primordial and connate with gesture communication. The 

 present rock engravings belong, I submit, to this class which also 

 includes most of the drawings of the Indians of the New World. 

 Representatives are found in New Zealand, (Mantell and Haast) 

 and amongst the less civilized nations throughout the world, and 

 in the traditions of civilized ones. With the advent of proper 

 names and the necessity for expressing these, and abstract ideas 

 generally, arose the 



II. Sub-Phonetic expression with (i) cuneiform writing made 

 up of symbols not necessarily phonetic, and when so not always 

 syllabic, accompanied by a determinative sign, (Layard, Nineveh 

 vol. ii. page 192) which is either a conventional symbol or a 

 difficult ideogram. This is the nature of the Assyrio-Babylonian 

 inscriptions. 



(2) Hieroglyphic writing with its phonetic symbols represent- 

 ing simple or syllabic sounds, accompanied by an imitative 

 emblem or pictogram as a determinative sign. Examples of this 

 class are found in Mexico and Egypt. 



Contemporaneously with hieroglyphic and cuneiform writing 

 arose the Hieratic or cursive forms of each of them, for events 

 of minor importance ; and from these again the demotic or popular 

 writing of Egypt, partially alphabetic and the alphabetical 

 Phoenician. This Phoenician with the Oriental languages generally, 

 whose origin it seems to indicate, and all the modern methods 

 of literary expression represent the Phonetic group. 



