rit of invention, of which they had given proof,
abandoned them here as elsewhere: if the merit of a discovery was often
their due, they were rarely able to bring their invention to perfection.
They kept the ideographic and syllabic signs which they had used at the
outset, and, with the residue of their successive notations, made for
themselves a most complicated system, in which syllables and ideograms
were mingled with letters properly so called. There is a little of
everything in an Egyptian phrase, sometimes even in a word; as, for
instance, in [ ] masziru, the ear, or [ ] kherou, the voice; there are
the syllables [ ] kher, the ordinary letters [ ], which complete the
phonetic pronunciation, and finally the ideograms, namely, [ ], which
gives the picture of the ear by the side of the written word for it, and
[ ] which proves that the letters represent a term designating an action
of the mouth. This medley had its advantages; it enabled the Egyptians
to make clear, by the picture of the object, the sense of words which
letters alone might sometimes insufficiently explain. The system
demanded a serious effort of memory and long years of study; indeed,
many people never completely mastered it. The picturesque appearance
of the sentences, in which we see representations of men, animals,
furniture, weapons, and tools grouped together in successive little
pictures, rendered hieroglyphic writing specially suitable for the
decoration of the temples of the gods or the palaces of kings. Mingled
with scenes of worship, sacrifice, battle, or private life, the
inscriptions frame or separate groups of personages, and occupy the
vacant spaces which the sculptor or painter was at a loss to fill;
hieroglyphic writing is pre-eminently a monumental script. For the
ordinary purposes of life it was traced in black or red ink on fragments
of limestone or pottery, or on wooden tablets covered with stucco, and
specially on the fibres of papyrus. The exigencies of haste and the
unskilfulness of scribes soon changed both its appearance and its
elements; the characters when contracted, superimposed and united to
one another with connecting strokes, preserved only the most distant
resemblance to the persons or things which they had originally
represented. This cursive writing, which was somewhat incorrectly
termed hieratic, was used only for public or private documents, for
administrative correspondence, or for the propagation of literary,
sci