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THE EGYPTIANS INVENT THE ART OF WRITING AND THE RECORD OF HISTORY BEGINS
THESE earliest ancestors of ours who lived in the great European wilderness were rapidly learning many new things. It is safe to say that in due course of time they would have given up the ways of savages and would have developed a civilisation of their own. But suddenly there came an end to their isolation. They were discovered.
A traveller from an unknown southland who had dared to cross the sea and the high mountain passes had found his way to the wild people of the European continent. He came from Africa. His home was in Egypt.
The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civilisation thousands of years before the people of the west had dreamed of the possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house. And we shall therefore leave our great-great-grandfathers in their caves, while we visit the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, where stood the earliest school of the human race.
The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were excellent farmers. They knew all about irrigation. They built temples which were afterwards copied by the Greeks and which served as the earliest models for the churches in which we worship nowadays. They had invented a calendar which proved such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time that it has survived with a few changes until today. But most important of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve speech for the benefit of future generations. They had invented the art of writing.
We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and magazines that we take it for granted that the world has always been able to read and write. As a matter of fact, writing, the most important of all inventions, is quite new. Without written documents we would be like cats and dogs, who can only teach their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and who, because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can make use of the experience of those generations of cats and dogs that have gone before.
In the first century before our era, when the Romans came to Egypt, they found the valley full of strange little pictures which seemed to have something to do with the history of the country. But the Romans were not interested in “anything foreign” and did not inquire into the origin of these queer figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls of the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the papyrus reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had understood the holy art of making such pictures had died several years before. Egypt deprived of its independence had become a store-house filled with important historical documents which no one could decipher and which were of no earthly use to either man or beast.
Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land of mystery. But in the year 1798 a French general by the name of Bonaparte happened to visit eastern Africa to prepare for an attack upon the British Indian Colonies. He did not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a failure. But, quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved the problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language.
One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary life of his little fortress on the Rosetta river (a mouth of the Nile) decided to spend a few idle hours rummaging among the ruins of the Nile Delta. And behold! he found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else in Egypt it was covered with little figures. But this particular slab of black basalt was different from anything that had ever been discovered. It carried three inscriptions. One of these was in Greek. The Greek language was known. “All that is necessary,” so he reasoned, “is to compare the Greek text with the Egyptian figures, and they will at once tell their secrets.”
The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than twenty years to solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French professor by the name of Champollion began to compare the Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta stone. In the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the meaning of fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from overwork, but the main principles of Egyptian writing had become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is better known to us than the story of the Mississippi River. We possess a written record which covers four thousand years of chronicled history.
As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means “sacred writing”) have played such a very great rôle in history, a few of them in modified form have even found their way into our own alphabet, you ought to know something about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming generations.
Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every Indian story of our western plains has a chapter devoted to strange messages written in the form of little pictures which tell how many buffaloes were killed and how many hunters there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not difficult t understand the meaning of such messages.
Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The clever people of the Nile had passed beyond that stage long before. Their pictures meant a great deal more than the object which they represented, as I shall try to explain to you now.
Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were examining a stack of papyrus sheets, all covered with hieroglyphics. Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with a saw. “Very well,” you would say, “that means of course that a farmer went out to cut down a tree.” Then you take another papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age 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
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.
The
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
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
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
. It is a giraffe. It is part of the oldsign-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.
埃及人发明写字的技术与历史记录的开始
在欧洲大陆上我们最早的祖宗很快的学会了许多新东西。我们可以这样说：倘有相当的时间，他们可以抛弃野蛮的生活，而发展一种自己的文明。但是他们的隔离生活忽然告终，被别人发觉了。
一个来自南方的旅行家，翻山过海的找到欧洲大陆上的野人这里来。他是从非洲来的。他的家是在埃及。
尼罗河流域，远在西方人还梦想不到有刀叉、车轮、房屋的可能之前数千年，早已发展程度很高的文明了。现在且把我们穴居的祖宗放在一旁，先来研究地中海南岸与东岸的历史，因为那里已有人类最早的文化。
埃及人教给我们许多东西。他们是很好的农业家。他们知道种种灌溉的方法。他们建造了庙宇，后来希腊的建筑就是模仿他们的，现在欧美的教堂，也以它们为最早的模型。他们又发明了日历，这个有用的计时方法，后来稍加变化，一直保存到今日。但是埃及人许多发明中最重要的一件，就是他们用以保存言语传给后代的写字技术。
如今看惯报纸、书籍、杂志的我们，以为世上人向来就是能读能写的。但在许多发明中，最重要的写字技术，乃是很新的。假如没有文字的记载，人将与猫狗无别；猫狗只能教给小猫与小狗一些简单的动作，因为它们不会写字，所以便无法利用过去的猫狗所有过的经验。
在公历纪元前一世纪内，罗马人来到埃及，发现那里充满了许多奇怪的，似乎与埃及历史有关系的小画。罗马人向来对于外国东西不发生兴趣，便也不追究这些在庙宇与宫殿的墙壁上，以及无数芦苇制的纸版上雕刻的奇形怪状的图像的起源。埃及最后一位能懂得制造这些图画的神圣技术的僧侣已在数年前去世了。埃及自从失去自主之后，便成为一所富藏重要的历史档案的仓库，这些档案，无人能解释，并且于人于动物都是毫无用处的。
过了十七个世纪之后，埃及依旧是一个神秘的地方。一七八九年适逢法国的大将拿破仑要讨伐英领印度的殖民地，到了非洲东部。他没有渡过尼罗河，便打了个败仗。但很意外的，这次著名的法国远征竟将古代埃及图画字（Picture Language）的问题解决了。
有一天，一个法国的少年军官在罗塞达
河边的小炮台（尼罗河的一个要口）把守得厌烦了，决意费几个钟点去搜寻尼罗河三角洲的遗址。他居然找到一块莫名其妙的石碑。这石也像其余的埃及东西一样，雕满了小像。但这块别致的黑色玄武石与从来所发现的东西有不同的地方。面上载着是三种文字。其中一种是希腊文，希腊文是懂得的。所以他想“只将埃及的图像与希腊的文字一对照，立刻可以知道它们的意义了”。
这方法说来虽然很简单，但足费二十余年的工夫，才把这个谜解决。在一八○二年，一位法国的大学教授祥普亮
，开始将这著名的罗塞达石的希腊字与埃及字互相对照。直至一八二三年他才宣布找到了十四个小像的意义。不久，他因工作过劳而死；但是埃及文字的主要原则已经明白。我们所以知道尼罗河流域的历史比米士失比河
的历史清楚些，因为我们有一部包含四千余年编年历史的记载。
古代埃及的象形字（Hieroglyphics）既然在历史上占有如此重要的位置（有几个与原字略有变化的字，居然可以在现在欧洲的文字中找出来），那么，在五千年前如何保存言语以利后代的巧妙方法，你应该知道一些。
古代的埃及字并不是一种符号字（Sign Language）。尼罗河岸的聪明的居民早已经过这个阶段了。他们的图画除去所代表的物象之外，还有许多别的意义。我现在设法告诉你。
比方你是祥普亮，你在研究一叠载满象形字的芦苇纸。忽然你看到一张一个人手里拿着一把锯子的画。你准会说：“唔，这意思当然是一个农夫出门去斫树。”你又拿起另一张纸来，上面讲的是一个皇后在八十二岁时逝世的一段故事。在字句之中，你又发现那个手里拿着锯子的人的画。八十二岁的皇后手里不会拿锯子的。那么，这画必另有意义了。可是什么呢？
这就是被那位法国人解决的谜。他发现埃及人是最早用我们现在所谓的“准音写字法”（Phonetic Writing）——就是在字母之外，再用点、画、钩的帮助，表现出准确的语音的写字方法。
让我暂时再回到那张小人与锯子的画（注：“锯”在英文是Saw）。“Saw”字有两种意义，一种可作木匠的某种器具讲，一种可作动词to see（看）的过去。
这字在几千年中是这样演变成的。最初的意思只是代表某种器具。后来把原意遗失了，变成一个动词的过去。再过几百年，埃及人把先后两种意义都遗失了，而这画
代表S这个字母了。有一句短句可以使你明白我的意思。这里有一句用象形字写成的现代的英文句子
这图可作“eye”（眼睛）讲，又可作“I”（我）讲（注：英文“Eye”与“I”音相同）。
这图可以代表“bee”（蜜蜂），又可以代表动词“to be”，又可以作为动词的前半，例如“Be-come”或“Be-have”。
在现在所举的例下跟着是
，这是代表“Leaf”或“leave”或“lieve”（注：这三字的音全相同的）。关于“eye”（眼睛）的画你已经明白了。
最后你看到的
是一只长颈鹿。
这是老的符号字的一部分，象形字就是从这里变化的。
现在你可以毫不费事地读这句子了。
“I believe I saw a giraffe”（我相信我看见了一只长颈鹿。）
埃及人发明这个方法之后，几千年来逐渐将它发展到他们爱写什么就可以写什么的程度。他们用这些“罐头文字”来与朋友通信、写帐、记载国家的历史，使后代人有了前车之鉴，便可不致再蹈覆辙。