The cuneiform character in itself is neither picturesque nor decorative.  It does not offer that delightful assemblage of birds and snakes, of men and quadrupeds, of heads and limbs, of tools, weapons, stars, trees, and boats, which succeed each other in perplexing order on the Egyptian monuments, to give permanence to the glory of Pharaoh and the greatness of his gods.  Cuneiform writing is essentially composed of thin short lines, placed in juxtaposition or crossing each other in a somewhat clumsy fashion; it has the appearance of numbers of nails scattered about at haphazard, and its angular configuration, and its stiff and spiny appearance, gives the inscriptions a dull and forbidding aspect which no artifice of the engraver can overcome.

[Illustration:  271.jpg Page image]

[Illustration:  272.jpg Page Image]

Yet, in spite of their seemingly arbitrary character, this mass of strokes had its source in actual hieroglyphs.  As in the origin of the Egyptian script the earliest writers had begun by drawing on stone or clay the outline of the object of which they desired to convey the idea.  But, whereas in Egypt the artistic temperament of the race, and the increasing skill of their sculptors, had by degrees brought the drawing of each sign to such perfection that it became a miniature portrait of the being or object to be reproduced, in Chaldaea, on the contrary, the signs became degraded from their original forms on account of the difficulty experienced in copying them with the stylus on the clay tablets:  they lost their original vertical position, and were placed horizontally, retaining finally but the very faintest resemblance to the original model.  For instance, the Chaldaean conception of the sky was that of a vault divided into eight segments by diameters running from the four cardinal points and from their principal subdivisions [symbol] the external circle was soon omitted, the transverse lines alone remaining [symbol], which again was simplified into a kind of irregular cross [symbol].  The figure of a man standing, indicated by the lines resembling his contour, was placed on its side [symbol] and reduced little by little till it came to be merely a series of ill-balanced lines [symbol] [symbol].  We may still recognize in [symbol] the five fingers and palm of a human hand [symbol]; but who would guess at the first glance that [symbol] stands for the foot which the scribes strove to place beside each character the special hieroglyph from which it had been derived.  Several fragments of these still exist, a study of which seems to show that the Assyrian scribes of a more recent period were at times as much puzzled as we are ourselves when they strove to get at the principles of their own script:  they had come to look on it as nothing more than a system of arbitrary combinations, whose original form had passed all the more readily into oblivion, because it had been borrowed from a foreign race, who, as far as they were concerned, had