stage The domestication of plants marked almost as wonderful an advance as the domestication of animals. When wild seedAgricultural grasses and plants had been transformed into the great cereals wheat, oats, barley, and rice people could raise them for food, and so could pass from the life of wandering hunters or shepherds to the life of settled farmers. There is evidence that during the Stone Age some of the inhabitants of Europe were familiar with various cultivated plants, but agriculture on a large scale seems to have begun in the fertile regions of Egypt and western Asia.1 Here first arose populous communities with leisure to develop the arts of life. Here, as has been already seen, we must look for the beginnings of history. 2 4. Writing and the Alphabet Though history is always based on written records, the first steps toward writing are prehistoric. We start with the pictures or rough drawings which have been found among the remains of the early Stone Age.3 Primitive man, however, could not rest satisfied with portraying objects. Picture writing VARIOUS SIGNS OF SYMBOLIC PICTURE WRITING I, war" (Dakota Indian); 2, 'morning" (Ojibwa Indian); 3, "nothing" (Ojibwa Indian); 4 and 5, to eat" (Indian, Mexican, Egyptian, etc.). He wanted to record thoughts and actions, and so his pictures tended to become symbols of ideas. The figure of an arrow might be made to represent, not a real object, but the idea of an "enemy." A "fight" could then be shown simply by drawing two arrows directed against each other. Many uncivilized tribes still employ picture writing of this sort. The American Indians developed it in most elaborate fashion. On 1 The plants domesticated in the New World were not numerous. The most important were the potato of Peru and Ecuador, Indian corn or maize, tobacco, the tomato, and manioc. From the roots of the latter, the starch called tapioca is derived. • See page 2. See the illustration, page 14. rolls of birch bark or the skins of animals they wrote messages, hunting stories, and songs, and even preserved tribal annals extending over a century. A new stage in the development of writing was reached when the picture represented, not an actual object or an idea, but a sound of the human voice. This difficult but allimportant step appears to have been taken through ing; the the use of the rebus, that is, writing words by pic P MEXICAN REBUS The Latin Pater Noster, "Our Father," is written by a flag (pan), a stone (le), a prickly pear (noch), and another stone (te). Sound writ rebus tures of objects which stand for sounds. Such rebuses are found in prehistoric Egyptian writing; for example, the Egyptian words for "sun" and "goose" were so nearly alike that the royal title, "Son of the Sun," could be suggested by grouping the pictures of the sun and a goose. Rebus making is still a common game among children, but to primitive men it must have been a serious occupation. In the simplest form of sound writing each separate picture or symbol stands for the sound of an entire word. This method was employed by the Chinese, who have never Words and given it up. A more developed form of sound syllables writing occurs when signs are used for the sounds, not of entire words, but of separate syllables. Since the number of different. syllables which the voice can utter is limited, it now becomes possible to write all the words of a language with a few hundred signs. The Japanese, who borrowed some of the Chinese symbols, used them to denote syllables, instead of entire words. The Babylonians possessed, in their cuneiform 1 characters, signs for about five hundred syllables. The prehistoric inhabitants of Crete appear to have been acquainted with a CRETAN WRITING A large tablet with linear script found in the palace at Gnossus, Crete. There are eight lines of writing, with a total of about twenty words. Notice the upright lines, which appear to mark the termination of each group of signs. somewhat similar system.2 The final step in the development of writing is taken when the separate Letters sounds of the voice are analyzed and each is represented by a single sign or letter. With alphabets of a few score letters every word in a language may easily be written. The Egyptians early developed such an alphabet. Unfortunately they never gave up their older methods of writing and learned Egyptian hi- to rely upon alphabetic Egyptian hieroglyphics are a curious jumble of object-pictures, symbols of ideas, and signs for entire words, separate syllables, and letters. The writing is a museum of all the steps in the development from the picture to the letter. eroglyphics signs alone. As early, apparently, as the tenth century B.C. we find the Phoenicians of western Asia in possession of an alphabet. It consisted of twenty-two letters, each representing a consonant. Phoenician The Phoenicians do not seem to have invented alphabet their alphabetic signs. It is generally believed that they borrowed them from the Egyptians, but recent discoveries in Crete perhaps point to that island as the source of the Phoenician alphabet. 1 Latin cuneus, "a wedge." 2 See page 71. 3 From the Greek words hieros, "holy," and glyphein, "to carve." The Egyptians regarded their signs as sacred. If they did not originate the alphabet now in use, the Phoenicians did most to spread a knowledge of it in other lands. They were bold sailors and traders who bought and sold Diffusion of throughout the Mediterranean. Wherever they the Phoenician went, they took their alphabet. From the Phoe- alphabet nicians the Greeks learned their letters. Then the Greeks EGYPTIAN AND BABYLONIAN WRITING Below the pictured hieroglyphics in the first line is the same text in a simpler writing known as hieratic. The two systems, however, were not distinct; they were as identical as our own printed and written characters. The third line illustrates old Babylonian cuneiform, in which the characters, like the hieroglyphics, are rude and broken-down pictures of objects. Derived from them is the later cuneiform shown in lines four and five. taught them to the Romans, from whom other European peoples borrowed them.1 5. Primitive Science and Art We have already seen that prehistoric men in their struggle for existence had gathered an extensive fund of information. They could make useful and artistic implements Foundations of stone. They could work many metals into a of scientific knowledge variety of tools and weapons. They were practical botanists, able to distinguish different plants and to cultivate them for food. They were close students of animal 1 Our word "alphabet" comes from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha (a) and beta (b). life and expert hunters and fishers. They knew how to pro duce fire and preserve it, how to cook, how to fashion pottery Louvre, Paris and baskets, how to spin and weave, how to build boats and houses. After writing came into general use, all this knowledge served as the foundation of science. We can still distinguish some of the first steps in sciCounting and entific knowlmeasuring edge. Thus, counting began with calculations on one's fingers, a method still familiar to children. Finger counting explains the origin of the decimal system. The simplest, and probably the earliest, measures of length are those based on various parts of the body. Some of our Indian Found in 1868 A.D. at Dibân, east of the tribes, for instance, employed Dead Sea. The monument records the victory the double arm's length, the single arm's length, the hand width, and the finger width. Old English standards, such hand, go back to this very as the span, the ell, and the Calculation of time; the calendar It is interesting to trace the beginnings of time reckoning and of that most important institution, the calendar. Most primitive tribes reckon time by the lunar month, the interval between two new moons (about twentynine days, twelve hours). Twelve lunar months give us the lunar year of about three hundred and fifty-four days. In order to adapt such a year to the different seasons, the practice arose of inserting a thirteenth month from time |