ommunities made that
decisive step in advance of which the honour belongs to the Phoenicians
alone. No one of them carried the analysis of language so far as to reduce
the syllable to its elements, and to distinguish the consonant, mute by
itself, from the vowel upon which it depends, if we may say so, for an
active life.

All those races who have not borrowed their alphabet _en bloc_ from their
neighbours or predecessors but have invented it for themselves, began with
the imitation of objects. At first we have a mere outline, made to gratify
some special want.[54] The more these figures were repeated, the more they
tended towards a single stereotyped form, and that an epitomized and
conventional one. They were only signs, so that it was not in the least
necessary to painfully reproduce every feature of the original model, as if
the latter were copied for its plastic beauty. As time passed on, writing
and drawing won separate existences; but at first they were not to be
distinguished one from the other, the latter was but a use of the former,
and, in a sense, we may even say that writing was the first and simplest of
the plastic arts.

In Egypt this art remained more faithful to its origin than elsewhere. Even
when it had attained the highest development it ever reached in that
country, and was on the point of crowning its achievements by the invention
of a true alphabet, it continued to reproduce the general shapes and
contours of objects. The hieroglyphs were truly a system of writing by
which all the sounds of the language could be noted and almost reduced to
their final elements; but they were also, up to their last day, a system of
design in which the characteristic features of genera and species, if not
of individuals, were carefully distinguished.

Was it the same in Chaldaea? Had the methods, and what we may call the style
of the national writing, any appreciable influence upon the plastic arts,
upon the fashion in which living nature was understood and reproduced? We
do not think it had, and the reason of the difference is not far to seek.
The very oldest of the ideographic signs of Chaldaea are much farther
removed from the objects upon which they were based than the Egyptian
hieroglyphs; and when the wedge became the primary element of all the
characters, the scribe ceased to give even the most distant hint of the
real forms of the things signified. Throughout the period which saw those
powerful empires flo