Kabanata Kabanata 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.