Note 93 — III. THE CITIES OF MESOPOTAMIA

A few words may be added here about the early development of writing; although true pictograms—images of the objects (Fig. 13)—occur, many of the most common objects are rendered by simpler tokens: either highly abbreviated (and hence conventional) pictures, such as a figure with two curved lines across one end (No. 4), which represented the horned head of an ox (the sign means “ox”), or, more often, purely arbitrary signs, such as a circle with a cross—the commonest sign of all—meaning “sheep.” The system, therefore, is a collection of abstract tokens eked out with pictograms. The range of notions which could be expressed was enlarged by certain combinations. The sign for “woman” combined with that for “mountain” meant “slave-girl,” since slaves were foreigners generally brought from Persia. The sign for “sun” could also mean “day” or “white.” That for “plough” could mean either the tool or its user, the ploughman. Even so the script was of limited usefulness. It could not render sentences, for it could not indicate grammatical relations. Its signs were ideograms which listed notions; and that was what the script was, first of all, required to do. But even within the Protoliterate period a further step was taken towards writing as the graphic rendering of language. We find that the arrow sign, for instance, was soon regarded, not as a rendering of the notion “arrow,” but as a rendering of the sound “ti,” which means arrow. For the arrow sign was also used to render the notion “life” which likewise sounded “ti.” This shows that the rendering of speech rather than notions had become possible. The development of writing consisted of a series of makeshifts and compromises introduced piecemeal when the shortcomings of the system being used became noticeable. Some signs acquired a variety of sound values. Some were used to clarify the sense of other groups, although they themselves were not pronounced at all. (These are called determinatives.) Thus “ti” when it meant “arrow” (and certain other implements) was accompanied by a sign which by itself read “gish” and meant “wood,” but which, used as a determinative, merely indicated that an implement of wood was referred to. Similarly, place-names were accompanied by the sign “ki,” meaning “earth,” divine names by the star sign, and so on. Nevertheless, the fact that phonetic values became attached to most of the signs made the rendering of grammatical endings, and, in short, of true speech, possible.