tain
very obvious limitations, it has one advantage over more developed
systems. The ideogram does not represent a word; it represents an idea.
Consequently it may be intelligible to people who, in spoken language,
represent the idea by very different words. For example, there are
several cases where a common set of ideograms appears to have been used
as a means of communication between people whose spoken language was
mutually unintelligible. The Chinese sign for "words" made
thus [Illustration: [Chinese character]] is a typical ideogram. It
represents a mouth with vapor rising from it.

The next step forward is the development of the ideogram into the
phonogram, or sound sign. When this step is taken, the ideogram, besides
representing an idea in a general way, represents a sound, usually the
name of the object represented by the ideogram or by one of its
components. A succession of these phonograms then represents a series of
sounds, or syllables, and we have a real, though somewhat primitive and
cumbrous, written language. Concurrently with this process the original
picture has become conventionalized and abbreviated. In this shape it is
hardly recognizable as a picture at all and appears to be a mere
arbitrary sign.

[Illustration: Comparative ideographs.]

After a time men discovered that all the sounds of the human voice were
really decomposable into a very few and that all human speech,
consisting as it does of combinations of these sounds, could be
represented by combinations of simple phonograms each of which should
represent neither an idea nor a syllable but one of the primary sounds.
The phonograms were then greatly reduced in number, simplified in form,
and became what we know to-day as letters.

This process appears to have gone on independently in many parts of the
world. In many places it never got to the point of an alphabet, and this
arrest of development is not inconsistent with a high degree of
civilization. The Chinese and Japanese script, for example, are to this
day combinations of ideograms and phonograms.

Three of the great peoples of antiquity carried this process nearly or
quite to a conclusion, although the method followed and the results
reached were quite different in the three cases. The three
civilizations, of the Egyptians in the Nile Valley, the
Assyrio-Babylonians in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
and the Cretans, centering in Crete but spreading extensively