.
Halevy and Guyard, nothing but the geographical titles of two districts of
Lower Chaldaea.

Sec. 4.--_The Wedges._

The writing of Chaldaea, like that of Egypt, was, in the beginning, no more
than the abridged and conventionalized representation of familiar objects.
The principle was identical with that of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and of
the oldest Chinese characters. There are no texts extant in which images
are exclusively used,[44] but we can point to a few where the ideograms
have preserved their primitive forms sufficiently to enable us to recognize
their origin with certainty. Among those Assyrian syllabaries which have
been so helpful in the decipherment of the wedges, there is one tablet
where the primitive form of each symbol is placed opposite the group of
strokes which had the same value in after ages.[45]

This tablet is, however, quite exceptional, and, as a rule, the cuneiform
characters cannot thus be traced to their primitive form. But
well-ascertained and independent facts allow us to come to certain
conclusions which even this scanty evidence is enough to confirm.

In inventing the process of writing and bringing it to perfection, the
human intellect worked on the same lines among the Turanians of Chaldaea as
it did everywhere else. The point of departure and the early stages have
been the same for all peoples, although some have stopped half-way and
others when three-fourths of the journey were complete. The supreme
discovery which should crown the effort is the attribution of a special
sign to each of the elementary articulations of the human voice. This final
object, an object towards which the most gifted nations of antiquity were
working for so many centuries, was just missed by the Egyptians. They were,
we may say, wrecked in port, and the glory of creating the alphabet that
men will use as long as they think and write was reserved for the
Phoenicians.

Even when their civilization was at its height the Babylonians never came
so near to alphabetism as the Egyptians. This is not the place for an
inquiry into the reasons of their failure, nor even for an explanation how
signs with a phonetic value forced themselves in among the ideograms, and
became gradually more and more important. Our interest in the two kinds of
writing is of a different nature; we have to learn and explain their
influence upon the plastic arts in the countries where they were used.

In our attempt to define the style