through
the Mediterranean Basin, developed three great varieties of script. All
started with pictures. The Egyptians continued to use the pictures in
their formal inscriptions down to the Persian conquest in the 6th
century B.C. This picture writing or hieroglyphic was well developed
and in the phonogram stage about 5000 B.C. The formal picture writing
of the hieroglyphic was admirably suited to formal inscriptions either
carved in stone or painted on a variety of substances. It was not
suited, however, to the more rapid work of the recorder, the
correspondent, or the literary man. The scribes, or writers, therefore
developed a highly abbreviated and conventionalized form of hieroglyphic
which could be easily written with a reed pen on papyrus, a writing
material to be described presently. The first specimens of papyrus,
containing the earliest known specimens of this kind of writing, called
hieratic, date from about 3550 B.C. Even the hieratic was too formal
and cumbersome for the common people and was further abbreviated and
conventionalized into an alphabet known as the demotic which was in
common use among the Egyptians from about 1900 B.C. to 400 A.D.

[Illustration: Names in hieroglyphic text of three of the most famous
Pharaohs, Cheops, Thothmes III and Rameses II.]

Among the Assyrio-Babylonians the use of an entirely different kind of
writing material caused the development of a very different type of
script. The lands inherited by these people were clay lands and they
made enormous use of clay and its products for building materials,
utensils, and also writing material. The early inhabitants of this
region very soon found that a permanent record could be made by marking
a lump of soft clay with a sharp stick and then drying it in the sun or
baking it in an oven. Naturally the picture very soon degenerated into a
series of marks made by holding the stick, or pointed implement, nearly
parallel to the clay and then thrusting it into the surface. The
resultant mark was like the following: [Illustration: cuneiform] This
script is called "cuneiform," from two Latin words meaning "wedge
shaped," from the obvious resemblance of the marks to wedges. The number
and arrangement of these marks developed successively into phonograms,
ideograms, and letters. The language, which was very complicated in its
written form, retained all three to the last.

[Illustration: First line of a cuneiform inscription commemorati