stration] and
[Illustration], we may, with a little good will, recognize a _shovel_ with
its handle, and an _ear_. But even in the oldest texts the instances in
which the primitive types are still recognizable are very few; the wedge
has in nearly every case completely transfigured, and, so to speak,
decomposed, their original features.

This is the case even in what is called the Sumerian system itself, and
when its signs and processes were borrowed by other nations, the tendency
to abandon figuration was of course still more marked. It has now been
clearly proved that the wedges have served the turn of at least four
languages beside that of the people who devised them, and that in passing
from one people to another their groups never lost the phonetic value
assigned to them by their first inventors.[51]

In the absence of this extended employment all attempts to decipher the
wedges would have been condemned to almost certain failure from the first,
but as soon as its existence had been placed beyond doubt, there was every
reason to count upon success. It allowed the words of a text to be
transliterated into phonetic characters, and that being done, to discover
their meaning was but an affair of time, patience, and method.

* * * * *

We see then, that the system of signs invented by the first inhabitants of
Chaldaea had a vogue similar to that which attended the alphabet of the
Phoenicians in the Mediterranean basin. For all the peoples of Western Asia
it was a powerful agent of progress and civilization. We can understand,
therefore, how it was that the wedge, the essential element of all those
groups which make up cuneiform writing, became for the Assyrian one of the
holy symbols of the divine intelligence. Upon the stone called the _Caillou
Michaud_, from the name of its discoverer, it is shown standing upon an
altar and receiving the prayers and homage of a priest.[52] It deserved all
the respect it received; thanks to it the Babylonian genius was able to
rough out and hand down to posterity the science from which Greece was to
profit so largely.

And yet, in spite of all the services it had rendered, this form of writing
fell into disuse towards the commencement of our era; it was supplanted
even in the country of its origin by alphabets derived from that of the
Phoenicians.[53] It had one grave defect: its phonetic signs always
represented syllables. No one of the wedge-using c