governors of
four of his provinces, would be wholly blind and unintelligible to the
mass of the population of such a country; and if the learned sculptor
who inscribed it, were to attempt to explain it to them, letter by
letter, they would forget the beginning of the lesson before reaching
the end of it,--and could never be expected to attempt extending the
knowledge by making known the interpretation which they had received
to others in their turn. But the royal scepter, with the four heads
before it, each of the heads accompanied by the appropriate symbol of
the city to which the possessor of it belonged, formed a symbolical
congeries which expressed its meaning at once, and very plainly, to
the eye. The most ignorant and uncultivated could readily understand
it. Once understanding it, too, they could never easily forget it; and
they could, without any difficulty, explain it fully to others as
ignorant and uncultivated as themselves.

It might seem, at first view, that a symbolical mode of writing must
be more simple in its character than the system now in use, inasmuch
as by that plan each idea or object would be expressed by one
character alone, whereas, by our mode of writing, several characters,
sometimes as many as eight or ten, are required to express a word,
which word, after all, represents only one single object or idea. But
notwithstanding this apparent simplicity, the system of symbolical
writing proved to be, when extensively employed, extremely complicated
and intricate. It is true that each idea required but one character,
but the number of ideas and objects, and of words expressive of their
relations to one another, is so vast, that the system of representing
them by independent symbols, soon lost itself in an endless intricacy
of detail. Then, besides,--notwithstanding what has been said of the
facility with which symbolical inscriptions could be
interpreted,--they were, after all, extremely difficult to be
understood without interpretation. An inscription once explained, the
explanation was easily understood and remembered; but it was very
difficult to understand one intended to express any new communication.
The system was, therefore, well adapted to commemorate what was
already known, but was of little service as a mode of communicating
knowledge anew.

[Illustration: SYMBOLICAL AND PHONETIC WRITING]

We come now to consider the second grand class of written characters,
namely, the _phonetic_, t