ady, has caused
Urukh (?), the pious chief, King of Hur, and King of the land (?) of the
Akkad, to build a temple to her." In the same locality where it occurs,
bricks are also found bearing evidently the same inscription, but written
in a different manner. Instead of the wedge and arrow-head being the
elements of the writing, the whole is formed by straight lines of almost
uniform thickness, and the impression seems to have been made by a single
stamp. [PLATE VII., Fig. 1.]

[Illustration: PLATE 7]

This mode of writing, which has been called without much reason "the
hieratic," and of which we have but a small number of instances, has
confirmed a conjecture, originally suggested by the early cuneiform
writing itself, that the characters were at first the pictures of
objects. In some cases the pictorial representation is very plain and
palpable.

[Etext Editor's Note: the next two pages contain many examples
of heiratic symbols [--] which can be seen only in the html file
or the jpg image <page0044.jpg>]

[Illustration: PAGE 44]

For instance, the "determinative" of a god--the sign that is, which marks
that the name of a god is about to follow, in this early rectilinear
writing is [--] an eight-rayed star. The archaic cuneiform keeps closely
to this type, merely changing the lines into wedges, thus [--], while the
later cuneiform first unites the oblique wedges in one [--] , and then
omits them as unnecessary, retaining only the perpendicular and the
horizontal ones [--] . Again, the character representing the word "hand"
is, in the rectilinear writing [--] , in the archaic cuneiform [--] ,
in the later cuneiform [--] . The five lines (afterwards reduced to four)
clearly represent the thumb and the four fingers. So the character
ordinarily representing "a house" is evidently formed from the original
--, the ground-plan of a house; and that denoting "the sun" [--] , comes
from [--] , through [--] , and [--] , the original [--] being the best
representation that straight lines could give of the sun. In the case of
_ka,_ "a gate," we have not the original design; but we may see posts,
bars, and hinges in [--] , the ordinary character.

Another curious example of the pictorial origin of the letters is
furnished by the character [--] , which is the French _une,_ the feminine
of "one." This character may be traced up through several known forms to
an original picture, which is thus given on a K