race, who, as far as they were concerned, had ceased to
have a separate existence. The script had been invented by the Sumerians
in the very earliest times, and even they may have brought it in an
elemental condition from their distant fatherland. The first articulate
sounds which, being attached to the hieroglyphs, gave to each
an unalterable pronunciation, were words in the Sumerian tongue;
subsequently, when the natural progress of human thought led
thi Chaldaeans to replace, as in Egypt, the majority of the signs
representing ideas by those representing sounds, the syllabic values
which were developed side by side with the ideographic values were
purely Sumerian. The group [symbol] throughout all its forms,
designates in the first place the sky, then the god of the sky, and
finally the concept of divinity in general. In its first two senses it
is read ana, but in the last it becomes dingir, dimir; and though it
never lost its double force, it was soon separated from the ideas which
it evoked, to be used merely to denote the syllable an wherever it
occurred, even in cases where it had no connection with the sky or
heavenly things. The same process was applied to other signs with
similar results: after having merely denoted ideas, they came to stand
for the sounds corresponding to them, and then passed on to be mere
syllables--complex syllables in which several consonants may be
distinguished, or simple syllables composed of only one consonant and
one vowel, or vice versa. The Egyptians had carried this system still
further, and in many cases had kept only one part of the syllable,
namely, a mute consonant: they detached, for example, the final u from
pu and bu, and gave only the values b and p to the human leg J and the
mat Q. The peoples of the Euphrates stopped halfway, and admitted actual
letters for the vowel sounds a, i, and u only. Their system remained a
syllabary interspersed with ideograms, but excluded an alphabet.

[Illustration: 274.jpg Page image]

It was eminently wanting in simplicity, but, taken as a whole, it would
not have presented as many difficulties as the script of the Egyptians,
had it not been forced, at a very early period, to adapt itself to the
exigencies of a language for which it had not been made. When it came to
be appropriated by the Semites, the ideographs, which up till then had
been read in Sumerian, did not lose the sounds which they possessed in
that tongue, but borrowed others