f an object becomes an ideograph, as in the following
instances:

Here the sacred ibis or the sacred bull symbolises the soul. The bee
stands for honey, the eyes for the verb "to see." Yet again these
pictures may stand neither as pictures of things nor as ideographs, but
as having the phonetic value of a syllable. Such syllabic signs may be
used either singly, as above, or in combination, as illustrated below.

But one other stage of evolution is possible, namely, the use of signs
with a purely alphabetical significance. The Egyptians made this
step also, and their strangely conglomerate writing makes use of the
following alphabet:

[Illustration: 299.jpg PAGE IMAGE]

In a word, then, the Egyptian writing has passed through all the stages
of development, from the purely pictorial to the alphabetical, but with
this strange qualification,--that while advancing to the later stages it
retains the use of crude earlier forms. As Canon Taylor has graphically
phrased it, the Egyptian writing is a completed structure, but one from
which the scaffolding has not been removed.

The next step would have been to remove the now useless scaffolding,
leaving a purely alphabetical writing as the completed structure.
Looking at the matter from the modern standpoint, it seems almost
incredible that so intelligent a people as the Egyptians should have
failed to make this advance. Yet the facts stand, that as early as
the time of the Pyramid Builders, say four thousand years B.C.,* the
Egyptians had made the wonderful analysis of sounds, without which the
invention of an alphabet would be impossible.

* The latest word on the subject of the origin of the
alphabet takes back some of the primitive phonetic signs to
prehistoric times. Among these prehistoric signs are the
letters A, E, I, O, U, (V), F and M.

They had set aside certain of their hieroglyphic symbols and given them
alphabetical significance. They had learned to write their words with
the use of this alphabet; and it would seem as if, in the course of a
few generations, they must come to see how unnecessary was the cruder
form of picture-writing which this alphabet would naturally supplant;
but, in point of fact, they never did come to a realisation of this
seemingly simple proposition. Generation after generation and century
after century, they continued to use their same cumbersome, complex
writing, and it remained for an outside nation to prove that