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Updated: May 7, 2025
Truly these cuneiform characters were strange and difficult to decipher! Imagine a collection of nails variously arranged, and forming groups horizontally placed. What did these groups signify? Did they represent sounds and articulations, or, like the letters of our alphabet, complete words? Had they the ideographic value of Chinese written characters? What was the language hidden in them?
The redaction of the incantation texts in the double style must not be regarded as a necessary indication of high antiquity, but only as a proof that the oldest incantation texts were written in the ideographic style, and that for this reason the custom was continued down to the latest period.
It is probable, however, that the idea of weaving complex ideographic characters would not occur to the primitive mind at a very early date, and a long period of progress would elapse before delineative subjects would be attempted.
The task of applying ideographic script to phonetic purposes is exceedingly difficult. In the ideographic script each character has a distinct sound and a complete meaning. Thus, in China shan signifies "mountain," and ming "light." But in Japanese "mountain" becomes yama and "light" akari. It is evident, then, that one of two things has to be done.
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.
"Just a moment, just a moment, my dear," exclaimed the Dean, smiling like a happy boy. "You've given me an idea. This may be a cryptogram, or an ideographic cypher. Just a moment, now; don't speak to me." He sat down at the desk and figured laboriously for nearly twenty minutes, working out the inscription in cypher, while Kit stared at him delightedly.
The use of the ideographic style is a survival of the ancient period when all texts were written in this manner, and the conservatism attaching to all things religious accounts for the continuation of the ideographic style in the religious rituals down to the latest period, beyond the time when even according to those who see in the ideographic style a language distinct from Babylonian, this supposed non-Semitic tongue was no longer spoken by the people, and merely artificially maintained, like the Latin of the Middle Ages.
The horror of a curve is pushed so far that even the sun, which is represented by a circle in Egyptian and other ideographic systems, is here a lozenge. It is very unlikely that even the oldest of these texts show us Chaldæan writing in its earliest stage. Analogy would lead us to think that these figures must at one time have been more directly imitative.
Two examples are given in Figs. 326 and 327. I shall expect, however, when the art of these peoples is better known, to learn to what particular mythic concept these mixed or impure geometric devices refer. Coiled tray with geometric devices probably modified by ideographic association.
Instead of a combination of as many as ten and fifteen wedges to make one sign, we have in the Persian never more than five, and frequently only three; and instead of writing words by syllables, sounds alone were employed, and the syllabary of several hundred signs reduced to forty-two, while the ideographic style was practically abolished.
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