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The particular fac-simile I had the honor to see was in the Lenox Library, New York, several years ago. Ani, according to the formula of the priesthood, goes through the adventures required of a shade before he reaches the court of Osiris. All the Egyptian pictures on tomb-wall and temple are but enlarged picture-writing made into tableaus. Through such tableaus Ani moves.
Now and then, when he comes to some specially important part, he draws, in gay colours, a little picture of the scene which the words describe. Now, you can understand that this picture-writing was not very easy work to do when you had nothing but a bruised reed to draw all sorts of animals with.
Let the cave-man, reader of picture-writing, be allowed to ponder over scientific truth. He is at present the victim of the alleged truth of the specious and sentimental variety of photograph. It gives the precise edges of the coat or collar of the smirking masher and the exact fibre in the dress of the jumping-jack. The eye grows weary of sharp points and hard edges that mean nothing.
But the depiction is little more than picture-writing, mere copies of traditional groups. The only thing regarded as of any interest is the meaning. The ethical and spiritual point of view overlies and smothers any interest in the representation.
They seem less to be paintings for the embellishment of life than eloquent picture-writing by which burning religious souls sought to preach the truths of the invisible world to the eye of the multitude.
The curious Aztec Picture-writing, known as the Codex Telleriano-Remenensis, preserved in the Royal Library of Paris, contains a list or calendar of a long series of years, indicated by the ordinary signs of the Aztec system of notation of cycles of years.
It is an interesting branch of psychological observation to note the images that are habitually associated with abstract or collective terms—what may be called the picture-writing of the mind, which it carries on concurrently with the more subtle symbolism of language.
In case Rube should return in his absence, he left a message in picture-writing on the paddle of the canoe. He followed Rube's direction over the shoulder of the mountain, and then began to look for tracks, finding them now and again, and particularly at the point where Rube had left the hill-side to begin his difficult climb across the face of the precipice.
They introduced the cultivation of maize and cotton, constructed extensive irrigating ditches, built roads, and were a progressive race. "But where is the country," asks Humboldt, "from which the Toltecs and Mexicans issued?" They were well housed, and even elegantly clothed, maintained public schools, and commemorated passing events by elaborate sculpture and by picture-writing.
Skill in the political art is the fruit of ages of intellectual and moral discipline; and just as picture-writing had to come before printing and canoes before steamboats, so the cruder political methods had to be tried and found wanting, amid the tears and groans of unnumbered generations, before methods less crude could be put into operation.
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