of Egyptian sculpture and to give
reasons for its peculiar characteristics, we felt obliged to attribute
great importance to the habits of eye and hand suggested and confirmed by
the cutting and painting of the hieroglyphs. In their monumental
inscriptions, if nowhere else, the symbols of the Egyptian system retained
their concrete imagery to the end; and the images, though abridged and
simplified, never lost their resemblance;[46] and if it is necessary to
know something more than the particular animal or thing which they
represent before we can get at their meaning, that is only because in most
cases they had a metaphorical or even a purely phonetic signification as
well as their ideographic one. For the most part, however, it is easy to
recognize their origin, and in this they differ greatly from the symbols of
the first Chaldaean alphabet. In the very oldest documents there are certain
ideograms that, when we are warned, remind us of the natural objects from
which their forms have been taken, but the connection is slight and
difficult of apprehension. Even in the case of those characters whose forms
most clearly suggest their true figurative origin, it would have been
impossible to assign its prototype to each without the help of later texts,
where, with more or less modification, they formed parts of sentences whose
general significance was known. Finally, the Assyrian syllabaries have
preserved the meaning of signs, that, so far as we can judge, would
otherwise have been stumbling-blocks even to the wise men of Nineveh when
they were confronted with such ancient inscriptions as those whose
fragments are still found among the ruins of Lower Chaldaea.

Even in the remote days that saw the most venerable of these inscriptions
cut, the images upon which their forms were based had been rendered almost
unrecognizable by a curious habit, or caprice, which is unique in history.
Writing had not yet become entirely _cuneiform_, it had not yet adopted
those triangular strokes which are called sometimes nails, sometimes
arrow-heads, and sometimes wedges, as the exclusive constituents of its
character. If we examine the tablets recovered by Mr. Loftus from the ruins
of Warka, the ancient Erech (Fig. 1), or the inscriptions upon the diorite
statues found at Tello by M. de Sarzec (Fig. 2), we shall find that in the
distant period from which those writings date, most of the characters had
what we may call an unbroken trace.[47] Th