First of all it had meant a man with a saw. Then it came to mean the sound which we reproduce by the three modern letters, s, a and w. In the end the original meaning of carpentering was lost entirely and the picture indicated the past tense of "to see." A modern English sentence done into the images of ancient Egypt will show you what I mean. [Illustration: eye bee leaf eye saw giraffe] The [Illustration: eye] means either these two round objects in your head which allow you to see, or it means "I," the person who is talking or writing. A [Illustration: bee] is either an animal which gathers honey and pricks you in the finger when you try to catch it, or it represents to verb "to be," which is pronounced the same way and which means to "exist." Again it may be the first part of a verb like "be-come" or "be-have." In this case the bee is followed by a [Illustration: leaf] which represents the sound which we find in the word "leave" or "leaf." Put your "bee" and your "leaf" together and you have the two sounds which make the verb "bee-leave" or "believe" as we write it nowadays. The "eye" you know all about. Finally you get a picture which looks like a giraffe. [Illustration: Giraffe] It is a giraffe, and it is part of the old sign language, which has been continued wherever it seemed most convenient. Therefore you get the following sentence, "I believe I saw a giraffe." This system, once invented, was developed during thousands of years. Gradually the most important figures came to mean single letters or short sounds like "fu" or "em" or "dee" or "zee," or as we write them, f and m and d and z. And with the help of these, the Egyptians could write anything they wanted upon every conceivable subject, and could preserve the experience of one generation for the benefit of the next without the slightest difficulty. That, in a very general way, is what Champollion taught us after the exhausting search which killed him when he was a young man. That too, is the reason why today we know Egyptian history better than that of any other ancient country. THE LAND OF THE LIVING AND THE LAND OF THE DEAD The History of Man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food. Wherever food was plentiful and easily gathered, thither man travelled to make his home. The fame of the Nile valley must have spread at an early date. From far and wide, wild people flocked to the banks of the river. Surrounded on all sides by desert or sea, it was not easy to reach these fertile fields and only the hardiest men and women survived. We do not know who they were. Some came from the interior of Africa and had woolly hair and thick lips. Others, with a yellowish skin, came from the desert of Arabia and the broad rivers of western Asia. They fought each other for the possession of this wonderful land.