It has also been conjectured that the black liquor of the scuttle-fish was frequently employed.[11] Of whatever ingredients it was made, it is certain, from chemical analysis, from the blackness and solidity in the most ancient manuscripts, and from inkstands found at Herculaneum, in which the ink appears like thick oil, that the ink then made was much more opaque, as well as encaustic, than what is used at present. Inks red, purple, and blue, and also gold and silver inks were much used; the red was made from vermilion, cinnabar, and carmine; the purple from the _murex_, one sort of which, named the purple encaustic, was set apart for the sole use of the emperors. Golden ink was used by the Greeks much more than by the Romans. The manufacture of both gold and silver ink was an extensive and lucrative business in the Middle Ages. Another distinct business was that of inscribing the titles, capitals, as well as emphatic words, in colored and gold and silver inks. _INK-HORNS._ The ink-horns were sometimes made of lead, sometimes of silver, and were generally polygonal in their form. _HIEROGLYPHICAL WRITING._ The remote antiquity of hieroglyphical writing may be inferred from the fact that it must have existed before the use of the _solar_ month in Egypt,—“which,” says Gliddon, “astronomical observations on Egyptian records prove to have been in use at an epoch close up to the Septuagint era of the Flood.” From Egyptian annals we may glean some faint confirmation of the view that they either possessed the _primeval_ alphabet, or else they rediscovered its equivalent from the mystic functions and attributes of the “two Thoths,”—the first and second Hermes, both Egyptian mythological personages, deified as attributes of the Godhead. To “Thoth,” Mercury, or the first Hermes, the Egyptians ascribed the invention of _letters_. The first attempts of “picture-writing” were to imitate certain images, each representing a word or letter. Drawing, therefore, was the most natural medium; and the study of representing things pictorially became popular and the only mode of communication. The true origin of alphabetical writing has never been traced; but that of the Egyptians has been proved by the Comte de Caylus to be formed, as stated above, of hieroglyphical marks, adopted with no great variations. “We find,” says Warburton, “no appearance of alphabetical writing or characters on their public monuments.”