Egyptians; we have piously accepted them from the Greeks; and our
contemporaries still swallow with resignation many of the abominable
mixtures invented on the banks of the Nile, long before the building of
the Pyramids.

It was Thot who had taught men arithmetic; Thot had revealed to them the
mysteries of geometry and mensuration; Thot had constructed instruments
and promulgated the laws of music; Thot had instituted the art of
drawing, and had codified its unchanging rules. He had been the inventor
or patron of all that was useful or beautiful in the Nile valley,
and the climax of his beneficence was reached by his invention of the
principles of writing, without which humanity would have been liable to
forget his teaching, and to lose the advantage of his discoveries. It
has been sometimes questioned whether writing, instead of having been
a benefit to the Egyptians, did not rather injure them. An old legend
relates that when the god unfolded his discovery to King Thamos, whose
minister he was, the monarch immediately raised an objection to it.

[Illustration: 315.jpg TH0T RECORDS THE YEARS OF THE LIFE OF RAMSES. 1]

1 Bas-relief of the temple of Seti I. at Abydos, drawn by
Boudier; from a photograph by Beato. The god is marking with
his reed-pen upon the notches of a long frond of palm, the
duration in millions of years of the reign of Pharaoh upon
this earth, in accordance with the decree of the gods.

Children and young people, who had hitherto been forced to apply
themselves diligently to learn and retain whatever was taught them, now
that they possessed a means of storing up knowledge without trouble,
would cease to apply themselves, and would neglect to exercise their
memories. Whether Thamos was right or not, the criticism came too late:
"the ingenious art of painting words and of speaking to the eyes" had
once for all been acquired by the Egyptians, and through them by the
greater part of mankind. It was a very complex system, in which were
united most of the methods fitted for giving expression to thought,
namely: those which were limited to the presentment of the idea, and
those which were intended to suggest sounds.

[Illustration: 316.jpg PAGE IMAGE]

At the outset the use was confined to signs intended to awaken the idea
of the object in the mind of the reader by the more or less faithful
picture of the object itself; for example, they depicted the sun by a
centred disc, th