But it is clear that from an early period the Egyptians had chosen a number of hieroglyphs to be used as vowels and consonants to write words with, that is to say, they had invented alphabetic writing. Their use of hieroglyphs in all these stages, picture, syllable, letter, is of great interest in the history of writing, as giving the whole course of development by which a picture, of a mouth for instance, meant first simply mouth, then the name of mouth ro, and lastly dropped its vowel and became the letter r. Of these three steps, the Mexicans made the first two.
In Egyptian hieroglyphics, special figures are not always set apart for phonetic use. At least, a number of signs are used sometimes as letters, and sometimes as pictures, in which latter case they are often marked with a stroke. Thus the mouth, with a stroke to it, is usually (though not always) pictorial, as it were, "one mouth," while without the stroke it is r or ro, and so on. The words of a sentence are frequently written by a combination of these two methods, that is, by spelling the word first, and then adding a picture sign to remove all doubt as to its meaning. Thus the letters read as fnti in an inscription, followed by a drawing of a worm, mean "worm" (Coptic, fent], and the letters kk, followed by the picture of a star hanging from heaven, mean "darkness" (Coptic, kake). There may even be words written in ancient hieroglyphics which are still alive in English. Thus hbn, followed by two signs, one of which is the determinative for wood, is ebony; and tb, followed by the drawing of a brick, is a sun-dried brick, Coptic tôbe, tôbi, which seems to have passed into the Arabic tob, or with the article, attob, thence into Spanish through the Moors, as adobe, in which form, and as dobie, it is current among the English speaking population of America.
The Egyptians do not seem to have entirely got rid of their determinative pictures even in the latest form of their native writing, the demotic character. How it came to pass that, having come so early to the use of phonetic writing, they were later than other nations in throwing off the crutches of picture-signs, is a curious question. No doubt the poverty of their language, which expressed so many things by similar combinations of consonants, and the indefiniteness of their vowels, had
