ntly a sound
or group of sounds; when each of them had thus acquired three or four
invariable associations of sound, he forgot their purely ideographic
value and accustomed himself to consider them merely as notations of
sound.

The first experiment in phonetics was a species of rebus, where each of
the signs, divorced from its original sense, served to represent
several words, similar in sound, but differing in meaning in the spoken
language. The same group of articulations, _Naufir, Nofir_, conveyed in
Egyptian the concrete idea of a lute and the abstract idea of beauty;
the sign expressed at once the lute and beauty.

[Illustration: 318.jpg PAGE IMAGE]

The beetle was called Khopirru, and the verb "to be" was pronounced
_khopiru_: the figure of the beetle & consequently signified both the
insect and the verb, and by further combining with it other signs, the
articulation of each corresponding syllable was given in detail. The
sieve _Miau_, the mat _pu, pi_, the mouth _ra, ru_, gave the formula
_khau-pi-ru_, which was equivalent to the sound of _khopiru_, the verb
"to be:" grouped together, they denoted in writing the concept of "to
be" by means of a triple rebus. In this system, each syllable of a
word could be represented by one of several signs, all sounding alike.
One-half of these "syllables" stood for open, the other half for closed
syllables, and the use of the former soon brought about the formation of
a true alphabet. The final vowel in them became detached, and left only
the remaining consonant--for example, _r in ru, h in ha, n in ni, b in
bu_--so that ru, ha, bu, eventually stood for r, h, n, and b only. This
process in the course of time having been applied to a certain number of
syllables, furnished a fairly large alphabet, in which several letters
represented each of the twenty-two chief articulations, which
the scribes considered sufficient for their purposes. The signs
corresponding to one and the same letter were homophones or "equivalents
in sound"--[ ] are homophones, just as [ ] and [ ], because each of
them, in the group to which it belongs, may be indifferently used to
translate to the eye the articulations m or n. One would have thought
that when the Egyptians had arrived thus far, they would have been led,
as a matter of course, to reject the various characters which they had
used each in its turn, in order to retain an alphabet only.

[Illustration: 319.jpg PAGE IMAGE]

But the true spi