Chinese and Sumerian

INTRODUCTION

THE NATURE OF SUMERIAN WRITING AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE ANALYSIS OF CERTAIN CHARACTERS

It has long been recognized by those most competent to judge, that Sumerian writing (that is, the primitive script of Babylonia, from which in the course of time were developed all the varieties of cuneiform) was originally of a pictorial or hieroglyphic nature. It is true that the primary pictograms or picture-characters of the system had already disappeared at the remote period of the fourth millennium B.c., to which the earliest extant monuments of the Sumerian language apparently belong ; but many of the more or less conventional linear forms which had by that time already usurped the place of the original hieroglyphs, are still quite obviously rude outlines of physical objects, presenting the remains of picture-characters as altered and simplified during centuries of use, in accordance with the convenience or caprice of the scribes and the practical exigencies of the instruments and materials of writing. As in Chinese one type of 4 wév, or old characters, displays every indication of the brush and pigment, while another gives equally clear evidence of the use of the graver or burin on hard substances such as stone, bronze, or bone; so in Sumerian the stiff angular outlines of the oldest forms of the written character suggest the practical difficulties of the engraver in hard stone when attempting to portray the rounder and more flexible outlines of nature.

The fact that the objects represented by many of the characters of linear Sumerian have not yet been identified, should not be allowed to make us sceptical of the pictorial origin of this most ancient system of writing. The evidence of those characters which can certainly be explained as copies of things visible is not invalidated by our present ignorance of the precise intention of the obscure remainder. It is enough for us that the symbols for the common objects of the natural world, such as sun, moon and stars, mountains, water, trees, reeds, man and his bodily organs and members, birds, fishes and other animals (in whole or in part), as well as artificial products of human activity such as houses, nets, knives, bows, vessels and implements of various kinds, are all characters which still exhibit more or less unmistakable vestiges of their pictorial or pictographic origin.

These primary signs were soon made to include other things, by natural transference to things in any way similar, and by the association of ideas. Take the