n a somewhat
clumsy fashion; it has the appearance of numbers of nails scattered
about at haphazard, and its angular configuration, and its stiff and
spiny appearance, gives the inscriptions a dull and forbidding aspect
which no artifice of the engraver can overcome.

[Illustration: 271.jpg Page image]

[Illustration: 272.jpg Page Image]

Yet, in spite of their seemingly arbitrary character, this mass of
strokes had its source in actual hieroglyphs. As in the origin of the
Egyptian script the earliest writers had begun by drawing on stone or
clay the outline of the object of which they desired to convey the idea.
But, whereas in Egypt the artistic temperament of the race, and the
increasing skill of their sculptors, had by degrees brought the drawing
of each sign to such perfection that it became a miniature portrait of
the being or object to be reproduced, in Chaldaea, on the contrary,
the signs became degraded from their original forms on account of the
difficulty experienced in copying them with the stylus on the clay
tablets: they lost their original vertical position, and were placed
horizontally, retaining finally but the very faintest resemblance to the
original model. For instance, the Chaldaean conception of the sky was
that of a vault divided into eight segments by diameters running from
the four cardinal points and from their principal subdivisions [symbol]
the external circle was soon omitted, the transverse lines alone
remaining [symbol], which again was simplified into a kind of irregular
cross [symbol]. The figure of a man standing, indicated by the lines
resembling his contour, was placed on its side [symbol] and reduced
little by little till it came to be merely a series of ill-balanced
lines [symbol] [symbol]. We may still recognize in [symbol] the five
fingers and palm of a human hand [symbol]; but who would guess at the
first glance that [symbol] stands for the foot which the scribes strove
to place beside each character the special hieroglyph from which it had
been derived. Several fragments of these still exist, a study of which
seems to show that the Assyrian scribes of a more recent period were at
times as much puzzled as we are ourselves when they strove to get at the
principles of their own script: they had come to look on it as nothing
more than a system of arbitrary combinations, whose original form had
passed all the more readily into oblivion, because it had been borrowed
from a foreign