3 BRONZE WEIGHT FROM NINEVEH. B. C. 880. 1 2 3 26 23 33 The Phoenician Letters are MNH MLK. EGYPTIAN PROPER NAME (CLEOPATRA), AS WRITTEN IN PHONETIC HIEROGLYPHS. Egyptian name of object. Letter signified. 8. is the female suffix, & 9 the proper-name suffix Alleghany and the Monongahela rivers; 11 denotes a small town near it. The ten figures below the tortoise are ten persons killed or taken prisoners by this chief. The twentythree strokes at the bottom show the strength of his party, and their inclination shows the direction from which they marched. In his first war party he took nothing; in the second he killed one man and took his scalp; in the third he killed a male and female, and took a female prisoner; in the fourth he took a male prisoner; in the fifth he accomplished nothing; in the sixth he took a male prisoner. Between this and his next expedition two or three years elapsed, as denoted by the space. In the seventh he took a female prisoner; in the eighth he killed a man; in the ninth a woman; in the tenth a man. Truly a large amount of information to be conveyed by so few characters. The ancient Mexicans, at the date of the Spanish invasion by Cortez, had doubtless made some advances beyond this purely pictorial stage. They had succeeded in reducing the earlier picture-writing within such exact rules, that the annals of their Kings were kept with much regularity, recording under each year the character of the harvest, the battles fought, towns taken, rebellious chieftains decapitated &c. They also grouped pictures together to express sounds. Thus the name of the town "Cimatlan" having to be written, they painted a figure of a certain root, termed cimatte, and another object the spoken sound of which was similar to tlan, near, and these two objects bracketed together expressed the word Cimatlan. This was a great advance, and must have led on to greater. Unfortunately the key to their systems of writing is now lost, and must ever remain, along with all that relates to their wonderful and unique civilization, in that obscurity to which Spanish greed and cruelty consigned it. An interesting episode in the invention of writing is furnished us by the Chinese. Isolated more or less for thousands |