Chapter Chapter 4 · Begins
These earliest ancestors of ours who lived in the great European
wilderness were rapidly learning many new things. It is safe to say
that in due course of time they would have given up the ways of savages
and would have developed a civilisation of their own. But suddenly
there came an end to their isolation. They were discovered.
A traveller from an unknown southland who had dared to cross the sea
and the high mountain passes had found his way to the wild people of
the European continent. He came from Africa. His home was in Egypt.
The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civilisation
thousands of years before the people of the west had dreamed of the
possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house. And we shall therefore
leave our great-great-grandfathers in their caves, while we visit the
southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, where stood the
earliest school of the human race.
The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were excellent
farmers. They knew all about irrigation. They built temples which
were afterwards copied by the Greeks and which served as the earliest
models for the churches in which we worship nowadays. They had invented
a calendar which proved such a useful instrument for the purpose of
measuring time that it has survived with a few changes until today. But
most important of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve speech
for the benefit of future generations. They had invented the art of
writing.
We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and magazines that we take
it for granted that the world has always been able to read and write.
As a matter of fact, writing, the most important of all inventions, is
quite new. Without written documents we should be like cats and dogs,
who can only teach their kittens and their puppies a few simple things
and who, because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can
make use of the experience of those generations of cats and dogs that
have gone before.
In the first century before our era, when the Romans came to Egypt,
they found the valley full of strange little pictures which seemed to
have something to do with the history of the country. But the Romans
were not interested in “anything foreign” and did not inquire into the
origin of these queer figures which covered the walls of the temples
and the walls of the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made
out of the papyrus reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had
understood the holy art of making such pictures had died several years
before. Egypt deprived of its independence had become a store-house
filled with important historical documents which no one could decipher
and which were of no earthly use to either man or beast.
Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land of mystery. But
in the year 1798 a French general by the name of Bonaparte happened
to visit eastern Africa to prepare for an attack upon the British
Indian Colonies. He did not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a
failure. But, quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved
the problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language.
One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary life of his
little fortress on the Rosetta river (a mouth of the Nile) decided to
spend a few idle hours rummaging among the ruins of the Nile Delta.
And behold! he found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything
else in Egypt it was covered with little figures. But this particular
slab of black basalt was different from anything that had ever been
discovered. It carried three inscriptions. One of these was in Greek.
The Greek language was known. “All that is necessary,” so he reasoned,
“is to compare the Greek text with the Egyptian figures, and they will
at once tell their secrets.”
The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than twenty years to
solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French professor by the name
of Champollion began to compare the Greek and the Egyptian texts of
the famous Rosetta stone. In the year 1823 he announced that he had
discovered the meaning of fourteen little figures. A short time later
he died from overwork, but the main principles of Egyptian writing had
become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is better known
to us than the story of the Mississippi River. We possess a written
record which covers four thousand years of chronicled history.
As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means “sacred writing”)
have played such a very great rôle in history, (a few of them in
modified form have even found their way into our own alphabet,) you
ought to know something about the ingenious system which was used fifty
centuries ago to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming
generations.
Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every Indian story of our
western plains has a chapter devoted to strange messages written in the
form of little pictures which tell how many buffaloes were killed and
how many hunters there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not
difficult to understand the meaning of such messages.
Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The clever people
of the Nile had passed beyond that stage long before. Their pictures
meant a great deal more than the object which they represented, as I
shall try to explain to you now.
Suppose that you were Champollion, 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 [Illustration] 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. [Illustration]
The [Illustration] 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 [Illustration] 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 [Illustration] 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 [Illustration]. 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, and they used
these “canned words” to send messages to friends, to keep business
accounts and to keep a record of the history of their country, that
future generations might benefit by the mistakes of the past.