The step from picturing or picture-drawing to writing by pictures is, as we have said, an immense one. But now we have to record one more step, almost as great, which is the transition from the picturing of single things--or, if you wish, single _ideas_--to the picturing, not of ideas at all, but of sounds merely. This is the step we have now to follow out, to trace the process through which picture-writing passed into sound-writing, and to find out how signs (for we shall see they are the same signs) which were originally meant to recall objects to the eye, have ended in being used to suggest, or, shall we say, _picture_, sounds to the ear. This is what we mean by _phonetic_ writing. A written word, let us remember, is the picture of a sound, and it is our business to hunt the letters of which it is formed through the changes they must have undergone while they were taking upon themselves the new office of suggesting sound. We said, too, that we must not expect to find any written account of this change, and that it is only by examining the _forms_ of the records of other events that this greatest event of literature can be made out. What we want is to see the pictorial signs, while busy in telling us other history, beginning to perform their new duties side by side with the old, so that we may be sure of their identity; and this opportunity is afforded us by the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptians, who, being people disposed to cling to everything that had once been done, never altogether left off employing their first methods, even after they had taken another and yet another step towards a more perfect system of writing; but carried on the old ways and the new improvements side by side. The nature of their language, which was in part radical and in part inflexional, was one cause of this intermixture of methods in their writing; it had partly but not entirely outgrown the stage in which picture-signs are most useful. Ideograph is the proper name for a picture-sign, which, as soon as picture-writing supersedes picturing, becomes the sign for a thought quite as often as it is the sign for an object. Very ancient as are the earliest Egyptian records, we have none which belong to the time when the invention of writing was in the stage of picturing; we only conjecture that it passed through this earliest stage by finding examples of picturing mixed with their other kinds of writing. Each chapter of the _Ritual_, the oldest of Egyptian books, has one or more designs at its head, in which the contents of the chapter are very carefully and ingeniously pictured; and the records of royal triumphs and progresses which are cut out on temple and palace walls in ideographic and phonetic signs, are always prefaced by a large picture which tells the same story in the primitive method of picturing without words. [Sidenote: Egyptian writing.]