To learn some four hundred such signs as these was the task set, as an equivalent of learning the a b c's, to any primer class in old Assyria in the long generations when that land was the culture Centre of the world. Nor was the task confined to the natives of Babylonia and Assyria alone. About the fifteenth century B.C., and probably for a long time before and after that period, the exceedingly complex syllabary of the Babylonians was the official means of communication throughout western Asia and between Asia and Egypt, as we know from the chance discovery of a collection of letters belonging to the Egyptian king Khun-aten, preserved at Tel-el-Amarna. In the time of Ramses the Great the Babylonian writing was in all probability considered by a majority of the most highly civilized people in the world to be the most perfect script practicable. Doubtless the average scribe of the time did not in the least realize the waste of energy involved in his labors, or ever suspect that there could be any better way of writing. Yet the analysis of any one of these hundreds of syllables into its component phonetic elements--had 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 the sequel shows. Nor is the utility of such an analysis self-evident, as the experience of the Egyptians proved. The vowel sound is so intimately linked with the consonant--the con-sonant, implying this intimate relation in its very name--that it seemed extremely difficult to give it individual recognition. To set off the mere labial beginning of the sound by itself, and to recognize it as an all-essential element of phonation, was the feat at which human intelligence so long balked. The germ of great things lay in that analysis. It was a process of simplification, and all art development is from the complex to the simple. Unfortunately, however, it did not seem a simplification, but rather quite the reverse. We may well suppose that the idea of wresting from the syllabary its secret of consonants and vowels, and giving to each consonantal sound a distinct sign, seemed a most cumbersome and embarrassing complication to the ancient scholars--that is to say, after the time arrived when any one gave such an idea expression. We can imagine them saying: "You will oblige us to use four signs instead of one to write such an elementary syllable as 'bard,' for example. Out upon such endless perplexity!" Nor is such a suggestion purely gratuitous, for it is an historical fact that the old syllabary continued to be used in Babylon hundreds of years after the alphabetical system had been introduced.(7) Custom is everything in establishing our prejudices. The Japanese to-day rebel against the introduction of an alphabet, thinking it ambiguous.