ceased to have a separate existence.  The script had been invented by the Sumerians in the very earliest times, and even they may have brought it in an elemental condition from their distant fatherland.  The first articulate sounds which, being attached to the hieroglyphs, gave to each an unalterable pronunciation, were words in the Sumerian tongue; subsequently, when the natural progress of human thought led thi Chaldaeans to replace, as in Egypt, the majority of the signs representing ideas by those representing sounds, the syllabic values which were developed side by side with the ideographic values were purely Sumerian.  The group [symbol] throughout all its forms, designates in the first place the sky, then the god of the sky, and finally the concept of divinity in general.  In its first two senses it is read ana, but in the last it becomes dingir, dimir; and though it never lost its double force, it was soon separated from the ideas which it evoked, to be used merely to denote the syllable an wherever it occurred, even in cases where it had no connection with the sky or heavenly things.  The same process was applied to other signs with similar results:  after having merely denoted ideas, they came to stand for the sounds corresponding to them, and then passed on to be mere syllables—­complex syllables in which several consonants may be distinguished, or simple syllables composed of only one consonant and one vowel, or vice versa.  The Egyptians had carried this system still further, and in many cases had kept only one part of the syllable, namely, a mute consonant:  they detached, for example, the final u from pu and bu, and gave only the values b and p to the human leg J and the mat Q. The peoples of the Euphrates stopped halfway, and admitted actual letters for the vowel sounds a, i, and u only.  Their system remained a syllabary interspersed with ideograms, but excluded an alphabet.

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It was eminently wanting in simplicity, but, taken as a whole, it would not have presented as many difficulties as the script of the Egyptians, had it not been forced, at a very early period, to adapt itself to the exigencies of a language for which it had not been made.  When it came to be appropriated by the Semites, the ideographs, which up till then had been read in Sumerian, did not lose the sounds which they possessed in that tongue, but borrowed others from the new language.  For example, “god” was called ilu, and “heaven” called shami:  [symbol], when encountered in inscriptions by the Semites, were read [symbol] when the context showed the sense to be “god,” and shami when the character evidently meant “heaven.”  They added these two vocables to the preceding ana, an, dingir, dimir; but they did not stop there:  they confounded the picture of the star [symbol] with that of the sky, and sometimes attributed to [symbol], the pronunciation kakkabu, and the meaning of star.  The same process was applied to all the groups, and