ampollion, and that you were examining a stack
of papyrus sheets, all covered with hieroglyphics. Suddenly you came
across a picture of a man with a saw. "Very well," you would say, "that
means of course that a farmer went out to cut down a tree." Then you
take another papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the
age of eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture of the
man with the saw. Queens of eighty-two do not handle saws. The picture
therefore must mean something else. But what?

That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved. He discovered
that the Egyptians were the first to use what we now call "phonetic
writing"--a system of characters which reproduce the "sound" (or phone)
of the spoken word and which make it possible for us to translate all
our spoken words into a written form, with the help of only a few dots
and dashes and pothooks.

Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw. The word
"saw" either means a certain tool which you will find in a carpenter's
shop, or it means the past tense of the verb "to see."

This is what had happened to the word during the course of centuries.
First of all it had meant only the particular tool which it represented.
Then that meaning had been lost and it had become the past participle
of a verb. After several hundred years, the Egyptians lost sight of
both these meanings and the picture {illust.} came to stand for a single
letter, the letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean.
Here is a modern English sentence as it would have been written in
hieroglyphics. {illust.}

The {illust.} either means one of these two round objects in your head,
which allow you to see or it means "I," the person who is talking.

A {illust.} is either an insect which gathers honey, or it represents
the verb "to be" which means to exist. Again, it may be the first part
of a verb like "be-come" or "be-have." In this particular instance it
is followed by {illust.} which means a "leaf" or "leave" or "lieve" (the
sound of all three words is the same).

The "eye" you know all about.

Finally you get the picture of a {illust.}. It is a giraffe It is part
of the old sign-language out of which the hieroglyphics developed.

You can now read that sentence without much difficulty.

"I believe I saw a giraffe."

Having invented this system the Egyptians developed it during thousands
of years until they could write anything they wanted