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He must be acquiring the very freshest ideas about Sanscrit and Greek; about the Ogham characters and the Cyprian syllabary; about early Greek inscriptions and the origins of Roman history, in addition to reading the familiar classics by the light of the latest commentaries. What is the tangible result, and what the gain of all these labours? The answer is the secret of University discontent.
The pictorial systems of the Egyptians and the Hittites required a hand skilled in drawing to express them; the cuneiform syllabaries of Babylonia, Assyria, and Elam needed an extraordinary memory to grasp the almost infinite variety in the arrangement of the wedges, and to distinguish each group from all the rest; even the Cypriote syllabary was of awkward and unnecessary extent, and was expressed by characters needlessly complicated.
A brief analysis of speech sounds will aid us in understanding the real nature of the syllabary. Let us take for consideration the consonantal sound represented by the letter b. A moment's consideration will make it clear that this sound enters into a large number of syllables.
Poebel, but it is quite clearly written in two of the passages, and has been correctly identified by Professor Barton. The Sumerian word is, in fact, to be read nig-gil-ma, which, when preceded by the determinative for "pot", "jar", or "bowl", is given in a later syllabary as the equivalent of the Semitic word mashkhalu.
The only critical list of hieroglyphics with their powers published recently is that of Erman, printed in his "Grammar." In the case of an altogether different system of ancient writing that has come down to us, the old cuneiform syllabary of the Assyrians, dictionaries, glossaries, and other works of a grammatical character have been preserved to the present day.
It was written, for the most part, with a script called the Manyo syllabary; that is to say, with Chinese ideographs employed phonetically, and it did not at all attain the literary standard of its Chinese prototype. The Nihon Shoki consisted originally of thirty-one volumes, but of these one, containing the genealogies of the sovereigns, has been lost.
Their colour is lighter than the Kruman's; there are pretty faces, especially amongst the girlish boys, and the fine feet and delicate hands are those of 'les Gabons. And they are interesting on two other counts. Furthermore they developed an alphabet, or rather a syllabary, which made much noise amongst missionary 'circles, and concerning which Lt. Forbes, R.N., Mr.
We cannot believe that any nation could have vaulted to the final stage of the simple alphabetical writing without tracing the devious and difficult way of the pictograph and the syllabary. It is possible, however, for a cultivated nation to build upon the shoulders of its neighbors, and, profiting by the experience of others, to make sudden leaps upward and onward.
See the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, twelfth session, 1881-2. Another hypothesis has been lately started, and an attempt made to affiliate the Cypriot syllabary to the as yet little understood hieroglyphic system of the Hittites. See a paper by Professor A. H. SAYCE, A Forgotten Empire in Asia Minor, in No. 608 of Fraser's Magazine. The History of Chaldæa and Assyria.
The decipherment of this character, however, even with this aid, proved enormously difficult, for it was soon evident that here it was no longer a question of a nearly perfect alphabet of a few characters, but of a syllabary of several hundred characters, including many homophones, or different forms for representing the same sound.
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