of Egypt had an existence: reverence for ancient custom, as well as their peculiar adaptedness to the purposes of architectural decoration, to which they were so largely applied, preserved them from corrupting change. But how easily, under the exigencies of familiar practical use, a true alphabet might have grown out of this cumbrous, long-winded, and intricate mode of writing, is shown in the history of its two derivative forms, the hieratic, and the demotic or enchorial. The former, the hieratic, is simply an abbreviated and cursive style of hieroglyphic, in which each figure is represented by a part of its outline, or otherwise so altered as to be hardly recognizable. It was the common written character of the priests and sacred scribes, from a very early period. The demotic was a still later adaptation of the same, and has lost all relics of a pictorial character, being composed of a limited, though large and unwieldy, number of arbitrary signs, chiefly phonetic. What farther improvement and reduction toward a true alphabetic form the demotic might in time have undergone, we cannot tell. For Greek influence and Christianity came in to interrupt the regular course of development; the Christian Coptic literature, casting aside the native modes of writing, adopted a new alphabet, founded upon the Greek.
The history of writing in China, although its final products are in appearance so different from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, goes back to a very similar origin. The Chinese themselves, with that love for historical research and record and the explanation of subsisting institutions which has always distinguished them, have set down for our benefit all the steps of the process by which their immense and unique system of signs has been elaborated out of its scanty beginnings; and both product and process present more numerous and striking analogies with spoken language and its growth than are to be found anywhere else in the whole history of written characters. We have already noticed the Chinese tradition that their earliest ancestors used knotted cords as a means of communication and record. Their first written signs were no development out of these, but a substitution for them. They were, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, simple pictures of
