, as
soon as writing comes into common use, most of those who employ it in the
ordinary matters of life have no time to waste. It is important that all
hindrances to rapid work should be avoided. The designs of the old writing
with their strokes sometimes broken, sometimes continuous, sometimes thick,
and sometimes thin, wearied the writer and took much time, and at last it
came about that the clay was attacked in a number of short, clear-cut
triangular strokes each similar in form to its fellow. As these little
depressions had all the same depth and the same shape, and as the hand had
neither to change its pressure nor to shift its position, it arrived with
practice at an extreme rapidity of execution.

Some have asserted that the instrument with which these marks were made has
been found among the Mesopotamian ruins. It is, we are told, a small style
in bone or ivory with a bevelled triangular point.[49] And yet when we look
with attention at these terra-cotta inscriptions, we fall to doubting
whether the hollow marks of which they are composed could have been made by
such a point. There is no sign of those scratches which we should expect to
find left by a sharp instrument in its process of cutting out and removing
part of the clay. The general appearance of the surface leads us rather to
think that the strokes were made by thrusting some instrument with a sharp
ridge like the corner of a flat rule, into the clay, and that nothing was
taken away as in the case of wood or marble, but an impression made by
driving back the earth into itself.[50] However this may be, the first
element of the cuneiform writing was a hollow incision made by a single
movement of the hand, and of a form which may be compared to a greatly
elongated triangle. These triangles were sometimes horizontal, sometimes
vertical, sometimes oblique, and when arranged in more or less complex
groups, could easily furnish all the necessary symbols. In early ages, the
elements of some of these ideographic or phonetic signs--signs which
afterwards became mere complex groups of wedges--were so arranged as to
suggest the primitive forms--that is, the more or less roughly blocked out
images--from which they had originally sprung. The _fish_ may easily be
recognized in the following group [Illustration]: while the character that
stands for the _sun_, [Illustration], reminds us of the lozenge which was
the primitive sign for that luminary. In the two symbols [Illu