. The dawn of civilization: Egypt and Chaldaea . e der Babylonier, p. 4. * Hommel, GescMchte Babyloniens und Assyriens, pp. 35, 36. This sign is taken from Statue B ofGudea (Hetjzey-Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée, pl. xvi. col. vii. 11. 59, 61). 5 The fragment which furnishes us with these facts has been noticed and partly translated byOppert, Expédition scientifique en Mésopotamie, vol. ii. p. 65. It comes from Kouyunjik, and is pre-served in the British Museum. It has been published by Menant, Leçons dépigraphie assyrienne, HIEROGLYPEIC ORIGIN OF THE CUNEIFORM CHARACTER. 727 nothing more tha
. The dawn of civilization: Egypt and Chaldaea . e der Babylonier, p. 4. * Hommel, GescMchte Babyloniens und Assyriens, pp. 35, 36. This sign is taken from Statue B ofGudea (Hetjzey-Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée, pl. xvi. col. vii. 11. 59, 61). 5 The fragment which furnishes us with these facts has been noticed and partly translated byOppert, Expédition scientifique en Mésopotamie, vol. ii. p. 65. It comes from Kouyunjik, and is pre-served in the British Museum. It has been published by Menant, Leçons dépigraphie assyrienne, HIEROGLYPEIC ORIGIN OF THE CUNEIFORM CHARACTER. 727 nothing more than a system of arbitrary combinations, whose original form hadpassed all the more readily into oblivion, because it had been borrowed froma foreign race, who, as far as they were concerned, had ceased to have a separateexistence. The script had been invented by the Sumerians in the very earliesttimes, and even they may have brought it in an elemental condition fromtheir distant The first articulate sounds which, being attached. ation, were words in the Sumerian tongue ; subsequently, when the natural progress of human thought led theChaldseans to replace, as in Egypt, the majority of the s^igns representing ideas bythose representing sounds, the syllabic values which were developed side byside with the ideographic values were purely Sumerian. The group »^ , ►»-[-,throughout all its forms, designates in the first place the sky, then the god ofthe sky, and finally the concept of divinity in general. In its first two sensesit is read ana, but in the last it becomes dingir, dimir ; and though it neverlost its double force, it was soon separated from the ideas which it evoked, tobe used merely to denote the syllable an wherever it occurred, even in cases pp. 51, 52 ; and since by W. Houghton, On the Hieroglyphic or Picture Origin of the Characters of theAssyrian Syllabary, in the Transactions of the Bibl. Arch. Soc., vol. vi., plate faciug p. 454. Collec-tions
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