The next stage of the invention, ideographic writing, the ancient Egyptians carried to great perfection, and reduced to a careful system. The signs for ideas became fixed, and were not chosen according to each writer’s fancy. Every picture had its settled value, and was always used in the same way. A sort of alphabet of ideographs was thus formed. A heart drawn in a certain way always meant ‘love,’ an eye with a tear on the lash meant ‘grief,’ two hands holding a shield and spear meant the verb ‘to fight,’ a tongue meant ‘to speak,’ a footprint ‘to travel,’ a man kneeling on the ground signified ‘a conquered enemy,’ etc. Conjunctions and prepositions had their fixed pictures, as well as verbs and nouns; ‘also’ was pictured by a coil of rope with a _second_ band across it, ‘and’ by a coil of rope with an arm across it, ‘over’ by a circle surmounting a square, ‘at’ by the picture of a hart reposing near the sign for water--a significant picture for such a little word, which recalls to our minds the Psalm, ‘As the hart panteth after the water-brooks,’ and leads us to wonder whether the writer were familiar with the Egyptian hieroglyph. So much was done in this way, that we almost wonder how the need for another method came to be felt; perhaps a peculiarity of the Egyptian language helped the splendid thought of picturing _sound_ to flash one happy day into the mind of some priest, when he was laboriously cutting his sacred sentence into a temple wall. The language of ancient Egypt, like that of China, had a great many words alike in sound but different in meaning, and it could not fail to happen that some of these words with two meanings would indicate a thing easy to draw, and a thought difficult to symbolize; for example, the ancient Egyptian word _neb_ means a basket and a ruler; and _nefer_ means a lute and goodness. There would come a day when a clever priest, cutting a record on a wall, would bethink him of putting a lute instead of the more elaborate symbol that had hitherto been used for goodness. It was a simple change, and might not have struck any one at the time as involving more than the saving of a little trouble to hieroglyphists, but it was the germ out of which our system of writing sprang. The priest who did _that_ had taken the first step towards picturing sound, and cut a true phonetic sign--the true if remote parent, in fact, of one of the twenty-four letters of our own alphabet.