The ancient and modern inscriptions of Asia, from the Red Sea to China, present many significant stages in the development of picture-writing.  In earliest ages the men of Asia made actual drawings of particular objects, such as the sun, trees, and human figures; subsequently these became conventionalized to a certain degree, but even as late as 3000 B.C. the Akkadian script was still largely pictographic.  From it originated the knife-point writing of Babylonian and Chaldean clay tablets, while among the peoples of Eastern Asia, who continued to draw their symbols, the transition to conventionalized pictures such as those made by the Chinaman was slower and less drastic.

In another line of evolution, the hieroglyphics of Egyptian tombs and monuments illustrate a most interesting intermediate condition of development.  These inscriptions have been deciphered only since the discovery of the famous Rosetta stone-fragment, which bears portions of three identical texts written in hieroglyphics, in Greek, and in another series of symbols.  The Egyptian used more or less formalized characters to represent certain sounds, while in addition to the group of such characters combined to make a word, the scribe drew a supplementary picture of the thing or act signified.  For instance, xeftu means enemies, but the Egyptian graver added a picture of a kneeling bowman to avoid any possible misapprehension as to his meaning.  The symbols denoting “to walk” are followed by a pair of legs; the setting sun is described not only by a word but also by its outline as it lies on the horizon.  Here again one is struck by the similarity between a stage in the historic development of racial characteristics and a method employed at the present time to teach the immature minds of children that certain letters represent a particular object; in a kindergarten primer the sentence “see the rat and the cat” is accompanied by pictures of the animals specified, in true hieroglyphic simplicity.

Just as the child’s mind develops so that the aid of the picture can be dispensed with, and the symbolic characters can be used in increasingly complex ways, in like manner the minds of men living in successive centuries have evolved.  While an evolution of human conceptual processes in general is not necessarily implied by the evolution of the forms of written language, the former process is in part demonstrated by the latter in so far as the change from the writing of pictures to the use of conventional symbols involves an advance in human ideas of the interpretation and value of the symbols in question.  A man of ancient times drew a tree to represent his conception of this object; in the writing of English we now use four letters to stand for the same object, and none of these symbols is in any way a replica of the tree.  It is certainly obvious that some change in the mental association of symbol and object has been brought about, and to this extent there has been mental evolution.