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My investigations do not support the theory that the blacks are capable of recording the simplest event by means of a system of so-called picture-writing, but rather that message-sticks have no meaning apart from verbal explanations. Blacks profess to be able to send messages which another may understand, but the tests applied locally invariably break down.
In Lord Kingsborough's great work on Mexican Antiquities there is one picture-writing, the Dresden Codex, which is not of Aztec origin at all. Its hieroglyphics are those of Palenque and Uxmal; and in this manuscript we have drawings of hatchets like those of Mexico, and fixed in the same kind of handles, but of much neater workmanship. But here we come upon a difficulty.
The Peruvians, at the time they were conquered by Pizarro, counted with knotted strings. After numerals, came picture-writing, hieroglyphics, and symbolic characters, such are were used by the Egyptians, the Chinese, and the Mexicans; which, however unconnected they may be with each other, are of the same general character.
It was a touch of poetic sentiment, but these Indian races of the Columbia lived in a region that was itself a school of poetry. The Potlatch was sentiment, and the Sun-dance was an actual poem. Many of the tents of skin abounded with picture-writing, and the stories told by the night fires were full of picturesque figures.
The wide plains were covered with green grass, and there were groves of palms, among which the Spaniards saw deer and various wild animals, and flocks of pheasants and turkeys. On their way they passed through a deserted village, in the temples of which they found records in the picture-writing, and also, to their horror, the remains of sacrificed victims.
The inference that the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians were thus produced, is confirmed by the fact that the picture-writing of the Mexicans was found to have given birth to a like family of ideographic forms; and among them, as among the Egyptians, these had been partially differentiated into the kuriological or imitative, and the tropical or symbolic: which were, however, used together in the same record.
At a very early time, however, what is called hieratic writing was invented, in which the symbols used represent not things but sounds, though the symbols used are adapted from those of the earlier picture-writing. It is in this hieratic character that the great mass of Egyptian literature is preserved to us; but here again we find that the new system did not banish the old one from use.
The Peruvian invention, indeed, was far below that of the hieroglyphics, even below the rude picture-writing of the Aztecs; for the latter art, however incompetent to convey abstract ideas, could depict sensible objects with tolerable accuracy.
Do you forget that action is the grand career for men who think as you do? Will this word-weighing and picture-writing the cold eulogies of pedants the listless praises of literary idlers, content all the yearnings of your ambition? You were not made solely for the closet; 'The Dreams of Pindus, and the Aonian Maids' cannot endure through the noon of manhood.
Then I took it more slowly. Again and again my forefinger traced the first of those four combinations. Martian writing is rather difficult to explain to an Earth man it is something of a cross between shorthand and picture-writing, and is an entirely different language from the spoken language of Mars. Upon Barsoom there is but a single oral language.
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