this system of determinatives. There was sound
reason back of it. It amounted to no more than the expedient we adopt
when we spell "to," "two," or "too," in indication of a single sound
with three different meanings. The Egyptian language abounds in words
having more than one meaning, and in writing these it is obvious that
some means of distinction is desirable. The same thing occurs even more
frequently in the Chinese language, which is monosyllabic. The Chinese
adopt a more clumsy expedient, supplying a different symbol for each
of the meanings of a syllable; so that while the actual word-sounds of
their speech are only a few hundreds in number, the characters of their
written language mount high into the thousands.

BABYLONIAN WRITING

While the civilization of the Nile Valley was developing this
extraordinary system of hieroglyphics, the inhabitants of Babylonia
were practising the art of writing along somewhat different lines. It is
certain that they began with picture-making, and that in due course they
advanced to the development of the syllabary; but, unlike their Egyptian
cousins, the men of Babylonia saw fit to discard the old system when
they had perfected a better one.(5) So at a very early day their
writing--as revealed to us now through the recent excavations--had
ceased to have that pictorial aspect which distinguishes the Egyptian
script. What had originally been pictures of objects--fish, houses,
and the like--had come to be represented by mere aggregations of
wedge-shaped marks. As the writing of the Babvlonians was chiefly
inscribed on soft clay, the adaptation of this wedge-shaped mark in lieu
of an ordinary line was probably a mere matter of convenience, since the
sharp-cornered implement used in making the inscription naturally made
a wedge-shaped impression in the clay. That, however, is a detail.
The essential thing is that the Babylonian had so fully analyzed
the speech-sounds that he felt entire confidence in them, and having
selected a sufficient number of conventional characters--each made up
of wedge-shaped lines--to represent all the phonetic sounds of his
language, spelled the words out in syllables and to some extent
dispensed with the determinative signs which, as we have seen, played so
prominent a part in the Egyptian writing. His cousins the Assyrians used
habitually a system of writing the foundation of which was an elaborate
phonetic syllabary; a system, therefore, far removed