"
Sir Henry Rawlinson says:
"So great is the analogy between the first principles of the Science of
writing, as it appears to have been pursued in Chaldea, and as we can
actually trace its progress in Egypt, that we can hardly hesitate to
assign the original invention to a period before the Hamitic race had
broken up and divided."
It is not to be believed that such an extraordinary system of
sound-signs could have been the invention of any one man or even of any
one age. Like all our other acquisitions, it must have been the slow
growth and accretion of ages; it must have risen step by step from
picture-writing through an intermediate condition like that of the
Chinese, where each word or thing was represented by a separate sign.
The fact that so old and enlightened a people as the Chinese have never
reached a phonetic alphabet, gives us some indication of the greatness
of the people among whom it was invented, and the lapse of time before
they attained to it.
Humboldt says:
"According to the views which, since Champollion's great discovery, have
been gradually adopted regarding the earlier condition of the
development of alphabetical writing, the Phoenician as well as the
Semitic characters are to be regarded as a phonetic alphabet that has
originated from pictorial writing; as one in which the ideal
signification of the symbols is wholly disregarded, and the characters
are regarded as mere signs for sounds.
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