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add the idea of wife? To do this we must pass from simple pictures to
symbols. Chinese writing has never advanced beyond this stage. Its
prodigious type-case of more than forty-two thousand characters
contains, therefore, only a series of pictures, direct and symbolic, all
highly conventionalized, but recognizable in their earlier forms. To
represent "wife" the Chinaman combines the two signs for "woman" and
"broom"; to represent "home" he makes a picture of a pig under a roof!
The Egyptian and Mexican systems of writing, though very different to
the eye, were both of this nature and represented ideas rather than
words. Yet all true alphabets, which are representations of sound, have
been derived from such primitive ideograms or pictures of ideas. What
was the process?

The rebus is the bridge from the writing of thoughts to the writing of
sounds, and it came into use through the necessity of writing proper
names. Every ancient name, like many modern ones, had a meaning. A
king's name might be Wolf, and it would be indicated by the picture of a
wolf. Ordinarily the picture would be named by everyone who saw it
according to his language; he might call it "wolf," or "lupus," or
"lykos"; but when it meant a man's name he must call it Wolf, whatever
his own language. So such names as Long Knife and Strong Arm would be
represented, and these pictures would thus be associated with the sound
rather than the thing. By and by it was found convenient, where the word
had several syllables, to use its picture to represent the sound of only
the first syllable, and, still later, of only the first sound or letter.
Thus the Egyptian symbol for F was originally a picture of the horned
asp, later it stood for the Egyptian name of this venomous creature, and
finally for the first sound in the name, being used as the letter F
itself; and the reason why we have the barred cross-piece in the F, the
two horns in U, V, and Y, and the four in W (VV) is because the Egyptian
asp had two horns, as may be seen from the illustration in the Century
Dictionary under the word cerastes; and every time that we write one of
these letters we are making a faded copy of the old picture. We find
systems of writing in all the stages from pure pictures to the phonetic
alphabet; in Egyptian hieroglyphics we find a mixture of all the stages.
So much for the background of the book as the bringer of a message to
the eye, but the outward form or wrapping of that m