Egyptians, the Semitic Babylonians, the Aryans of India and Persia, and their kinsmen, the Greeks and Romans, when they first appear in the morning light of history.
We need not dwell upon the inestimable value to man of the acquisition of language. Without it all his other acquisitions and discoveries would have remained comparatively fruitless, all his efforts to lift himself to higher levels of culture have been unavailing. Without it, so far as we can see, he must have remained forever in an unprogressive and savage or semi-savage state.
12. The Invention of Writing.—Still another achievement of prehistoric man, and after the making of language perhaps his greatest, certainly the most fruitful, was the invention of writing.
The first form of writing used by primitive man was picture writing, such as was and is still used by some of the Indian tribes
Fig. 6.—Indian Picture Writing.[1] (After Mallery-Deniker)
of the New World. In this system of writing the characters are rude pictures of material objects, as for instance a picture of an eye 
to indicate the organ of sight; or they are symbols of ideas, as for illustration a picture consisting of wavy lines beneath an arc representing the sky 
to indicate rain. This way of representing ideas, which seems natural to man, is known as ideographic writing, and the signs are. called ideograms.
A great step in advance is taken when the picture writer uses his pictures or symbols to represent not actual objects or ideas, but sounds of the human voice, that is, words. This step was taken in prehistoric times by different peoples independently. It seems to have been taken by means of the rebus, a mode of writing which children love to employ. What makes rebus writing possible is the existence in every language of words having
- ↑ Record of an Alaskan hunt. It reads thus: I go, by boat (indicated by paddle); sleep one night (hand to side of head denotes sleep), on island with two huts; I go to another island; two sleeps there; hunt with harpoon, sea lion; also with bow; return by boat with companion (indicated by two oars), to my lodge.
