Rawlinson would have found inadequate to open Egypt and Assyria, but for the famous trilingual tablets of Rosetta and Behistun.
If the acquisition of such a language of symbols requires more time and labor than we can expend upon it, we can yet recognize the ingenuity implied in the six classes into which these figures have long been divided. They repre- sent forms of objects and symbols of abstractions. They combine these images to suggest other ideas and objects. They vary the attitudes of the same figure to convey contrasts of meaning ; and they lend themselves immeas- urably to phonetic uses, both with and without explanatory additions.
The startling discovery of this symbolism of a great civilization, two centuries ago, led Pere Amyot to Effect of call it "the picturesque alphabet of the arts and *^'^'^" ^ A ^ covery on sciences." Its uniqueness has grown more evi- Europeans. dent with time. Of purely native origin, it is a genuine triumph of the concrete genius of the Yellow Race ; yet there is scarcely a system of ideography in the world with which the identification of these signs has not been attempted.
The natural hope of connecting them with the oldest Egyptian proved a failure, in the fanciful analogies Theories of of De Guignes, Amyot, and Kidd.[1] The Chinese figures are more practical and less mythological; they have pure allegorical combinations, and none that unite animal and human forms; they are ruder than the hieroglyphics, where ideography is in its bloom. All these differences point to the fact that the one system came from the art-culture of a priestly caste, and that of the other from the practical needs of an industrial people; though it is probable
- ↑ The Lettre de Pekin gives De Guignes's system. As he used the worthless authority of Horapollo, so Amyot trusted a similar witness in Kircher. See also Notes and Queries; Kidd's China, pp. 10, 68.
