File:A history of science (1904) (14595161658).jpg

Identifier: cu31924003595109 (find matches)
Title: A history of science
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Williams, Henry Smith, 1863-1943 Williams, Edward Huntington, 1868-1944. joint author
Subjects: Science
Publisher: New York, London, Harper & brothers
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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in old Assyria in the longgenerations when that land was the culture centre ofthe world. Nor was the task confined to the nativesof Babylonia and Assyria alone. About the fifteenthcentury B.C., and probably for a long time before andafter that period, the exceedingly complex syllabaryof the Babylonians was the official means of com-munication throughout western Asia and between Asiaand Egypt, as we know from the chance discoveryof a collection of letters belonging to the Egyptianking Khun-aten, preserved at Tel-el-Amarna. In thetime of Ramses the Great the Babylonian writing wasin all probability considered by a majority of themost highly civilized people in the world to be themost perfect script practicable. Doubtless the aver-age scribe of the time did not in the least realize thewaste of energy involved in his labors, or ever suspectthat there could be any better way of writing. Yet the analysis of any one of these hundreds ofsyllables into its component phonetic elements—had 96
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OLD BABYLONIAN INSCRIPTION, (Reproduced from Williams History of iJw An of Wnling) DEVELOPMENT OF THE ALPHABET any one been genius enough to make such analysis—would have given the key to simpler and better things.But such an analysis was very hard to make, as thesequel shows. Nor is the utility of such an analysisself-evident, as the experience of the Egyptians proved.The vowel sound is so intimately linked with the con-sonant— the cow-sonant, implying this intimate re-lation in its very name — that it seemed extremelydifficult to give it individual recognition. To set offthe mere labial beginning of the sound by itself, and torecognize it as an all-essential element of phonation,was the feat at which human intelligence so longbalked. The germ of great things lay in that analysis.It was a process of simplification, and all art develop-ment is from the complex to the simple. Unfort-unately, however, it did not seem a simplification, butrather quite the reverse. We may well suppo

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