to do with it, just as we see that poverty of language, and the consequent necessity of making similar words do duty for many different ideas, has led the Chinese to use in their writing determinative signs, the so-called keys or radicals, which were originally pictures, though now hardly recognizable as such. Nothing proves that the Egyptian determinative signs were not mere useless lumber, so well as the fact that if there had been none, the deciphering of the hieroglyphics in modern times could hardly have gone a step beyond the first stage, the spelling out of the kings' names.
We thus see that the ancient Egyptians and the Aztecs made in much the same way the great step from picture-writing to word-writing. To have used the picture of an object to represent the sound of the root or crude-form of its name, as the Mexicans did in drawing a hand, ma(itl), to represent, not a hand, but the sound ma; and teeth, tlan(tli), to represent, not teeth, but the sound tlan, though they do not seem to have applied it to anything but the writing of proper names and foreign words, is sufficient to show that they had started on the road which led the Egyptians to a system of syllabic, and to some extent of alphabetic writing. There is even evidence that the Maya nation of Yucatan, the ruins of whose temples and palaces are so well known from the travels of Catherwood and Stephens, not only had a system of phonetic writing, but used it for writing ordinary words and sentences. A Spanish MS., "Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan," bearing the date of 1561, and the name of Diego de Landa, Bishop of Merida, has been published by the Abbé Brasseur,[1] and contains not only a set of chronological signs resembling the figures of the Central American sculptures and the Dresden Codex, but a list of over thirty characters, some alphabetic, as a, i, m, n; some syllabic, as ku, ti; and a sentence, ma in kati, "I will not," written with them. The genuineness of this information, and its bearing on the interpretation of the inscriptions on the monuments, are matters for future investigation.
Yet another people, the Chinese, made the advance from
- ↑ Brasseur, 'Relation des Choses de Yucatan de Diego de Landa,' etc.; Paris and London, 1864.
