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The origin of writing, that is of the art of transmitting information by means of symbols representing speech, is, like the origin of every other invention, obscure and uncertain. It is not the proud Aryan, nor his elder brother the Semite, who can claim the honour of the invention. It belongs neither to Japhet nor to Shem (convenient eponyms) but to the despised Ham, with whom they are unwilling to acknowledge kinship. Four thousand years before Christ (the very period at which, in Milton's opinion, Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise) the people of the Nile Valley formed a rich and powerful monarchy, with an old civilisation, and possessed the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and writing. Their writing was chiefly upon stone monuments, and recorded the deeds of their Kings or the greatness of their Gods. They also wrote upon leaves of papyrus the forms of prayer and eulogy which were buried with their dead. Among the surviving written productions of that great monarchy is a work containing the Moral Precepts of Ptah-Hotep. Written in the language of Khem (old Egypt), and in the hieratic character, upon papyrus, it is "the oldest book in the world." The period of its composition is more ancient than the date of the writing, which, by internal evidence, has been proved to be over 2000 B.C. It is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and is known by the name of the Papyrus Prisse. As there can be no question that hieroglyphic writing (engraving) upon stone was considerably anterior to the evolution of the cursive hieratic written with pen and ink upon papyrus; and as there is a hieroglyphic inscription on stone in the Ashmolean Museum which is assigned to 4000 B.C.—we must infer that the real age of Egyptian writing is beyond our ken. It must be at the least six thousand years old; and there are numerous examples in lapidar inscriptions which represent the millennium preceding the date of the Prisse Papyrus. With this book, written several centuries before Moses dwelt in the land of Egypt, a sketch of the history of writing may modestly begin. It must not be imagined that the dates of Egyptian and Babylonian documents are based upon enthusiastic conjecture, or upon unaided calculation of the years assigned to the lives and reigns of monarchs in their newly discovered and deciphered records. Josephus and Eusebius have preserved fragments of older historical writers, among them portions of the lost Chronicles of Berossus the Chaldæan and Manetho the Egyptian, whose works were written in Greek in the fourth and third centuries before Christ. In former days, when scholars were nurtured upon the Christian chronology which counted the birth of Christ as A.M. 4004, or A.M. 5870, according as the Hebrew Bible or the Septuagint was adopted as the authority for dates, it was the custom to deride as fabulous the immense lists of Chaldean and Egyptian dynasties, which spoiled the story of Genesis; but the hieroglyphic and the cuneiform monuments have yielded up their long-buried testimony to justify the discredited chroniclers. Nothing in romance is more wonderful than the story of the work of interpretation, by which old Egypt and old Assyria have been brought forward into the light of authentic history. Two generations of acute and patient scholars working contemporaneously in England, France, Germany, and Italy, have contrived, without dictionary, without grammar, without even a key to the mysterious letters, to decipher and to read the stony records of those ancient empires. Their first labour was to distinguish the symbols, and to assign to them a phonetic value, then to compare the resultant words with the vocabulary of known languages supposed to be akin to the old ones. In the case of the hieroglyphics, the Coptic language alone offered its aid, this being the tongue of Egypt as written and spoken in the first ten centuries of our era, genuine Egyptian indeed, but necessarily differing enormously from its earliest phases thousands of years back. As to the cuneiform inscriptions, the various Semitic tongues furnished means of comparison for Assyrian texts, the Persian and "Zend" for old Persic and Median, and certain cuneiform vocabularies were discovered which rendered it possible to understand a third language, the most ancient of them all, which had been utterly unknown even by name. From the time of Christ, perhaps even before it, down to sixty years ago, the languages and monuments of Egypt and Chaldæa had never been looked upon by the eye of intelligence. The mystery of ages is a mystery no more.

Writing in Chaldæa, 4000 B.C.

The age of Chaldæan writing (engraving) is not far behind that of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. It is said that an inscription of the first Sargon, King of Akkad (in the square or angular character out of which the wedge-shaped or cuneiform letters were evolved), carries the record back to 3800 B.C. Even if we take a large latitude in discounting the chronology, there still remains a certainty that the cuneiform character of Babylonia was used over the greater part of Western Asia from at least 2500 B.C., and in Persia and its tributaries down to 300 B.C. While, of the Egyptian writing, we have remains exhibiting all the stages of development, namely (1) the hieroglyphic, (2) the hieratic, (3) the demotic, (4) the Coptic in Greek letters; of the cuneiform script we have only the two phases which may be roughly said to correspond to the Egyptian hieratic and demotic, or more exactly to two stages of the hieratic. We cannot reconstruct the original Chaldæan hieroglyphics which must have preceded the Chaldæan hieratic and cuneiform; nor do we know (at present) of any truly cursive hand developed from the wedge-letters. Among the relics of the Assyrians is a great number of stone tablets of small size, containing reports to the monarch from provincial governors. One of them, now in the British Museum, is supposed, from a phrase which occurs in it, to show that the stone tablets were simply copies made for preservation in the archives, while the actually transmitted originals were written on papyrus. If that were the practice, and there is inherent probability in the suggestion, there would assuredly have been a great quantity of papyrus used throughout the Assyrian empire; yet not a fragment of that material has been discovered. In the absence of some positive evidence, we can but suppose it likely that the Assyrians used papyrus (or skins) for writing on, as well as the Egyptians, but applied it only to temporary purposes, trusting rather to granite and brick, than to paper or to leather, whatever was intended for enduring record.