The Story of Mankind [10]
of eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture
of the man with the saw. Queens of eighty-two do not handle
saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But
what?
That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved.
He discovered that the Egyptians were the first to use what
we now call ``phonetic writing''--a system of characters which
reproduce the ``sound'' (or phone) of the spoken word and
which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words
into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes
and pothooks.
Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw.
The word ``saw'' either means a certain tool which you will find
in a carpenter's shop, or it means the past tense of the verb
``to see.''
This is what had happened to the word during the course
of centuries. First of all it had meant only the particular tool
which it represented. Then that meaning had been lost and it
had become the past participle of a verb. After several hundred
years, the Egyptians lost sight of both these meanings and
the picture {illust.} came to stand for a single letter, the
letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean. Here
is a modern English sentence as it would have been written in
hieroglyphics. {illust.}
The {illust.} either means one of these two round objects
in your head, which allow you to see or it means ``I,'' the person
who is talking.
A {illust.} is either an insect which gathers honey, or it
represents the verb ``to be'' which means to exist. Again, it
may be the first part of a verb like ``be-come'' or ``be-have.''
In this particular instance it is followed by {illust.} which
means a ``leaf'' or ``leave'' or ``lieve'' (the sound of all three
words is the same).
The ``eye'' you know all about.
Finally you get the picture of a {illust.}. It is a giraffe
It is part of the old sign-language out of which the hieroglyphics
developed.
You can now read that sentence without much difficulty.
``I believe I saw a giraffe.''
Having invented this system the Egyptians developed it
during thousands of years until they could write anything they
wanted, and they used these ``canned words'' to send messages
to friends, to keep business accounts and to keep a record of the
history of their country, that future generations might benefit
by the mistakes of the past.
THE NILE VALLEY
THE BEGINNING OF CIVILISATION IN THE
VALLEY OF THE NILE
THE history of man is the record of a hungry creature in
search of food. Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has
travelled to make his home.
The fame of the Valley of the Nile must have spread at
an early date. From the interior of Africa and from the desert
of Arabia and from the western part of Asia people had
flocked to Egypt to claim their share of the rich farms.
Together these invaders had formed a new race which called
itself ``Remi'' or ``the Men'' just as we sometimes call America
``God's own country.'' They had good reason to be grateful
to a Fate which had carried them to this narrow strip of land.
In the summer of each year the Nile turned the valley into a
shallow lake and when the waters receded all the grainfields
and the pastures were covered with several inches of the most
fertile clay.
In Egypt a kindly river did the work of a million men and
made it possible to feed the teeming population of the first
large cities of which we have any record. It is true that all
the arable land was not in the valley. But a complicated
system of small canals and well-sweeps carried water from
the river-level to the top of the highest banks and an even
more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread it throughout
the land.
While man of the prehistoric age had been obliged to spend
sixteen hours out of every twenty-four gathering food for himself
and