whose fate, in surviving the ruin of so many empires, and being brought from so far to enlighten us on the history of past ages, can never cease to astonish us. When we look at them again, let us spare a thought to the history of the character itself. Its mysteries have cost even greater labour to unravel than hieroglyphics themselves. To the latest times of the use of cuneiform by the Achæmenidæ, pictorial, symbolic, and phonetic groups continued to be mixed together, and a system of determinative signs was employed to show the reader in what sense each word was to be taken. But this system of writing never reached the perfection attained by the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It never advanced to the use of what may be called true letters, never beyond the use of syllabic signs. So that in time it was superseded by alphabets descended from the Egyptian. The symbolism, too, of the cuneiform writing is very complex, and the difficulty of reading the signs used phonetically is greatly increased by the fact of the language from which they acquired their values (a Turanian one) being different from the Semitic tongue, in which the most important records are written. Of other systems of writing, chiefly pictorial, known in the ancient world, such as the Hittite and the Cypriot--or, again, of the picture-writing of many other savage tribes beside the North American Indians, it is not necessary to speak. For we are not writing a history of alphabets, but of the acquisition of the _art_ of writing by mankind. CHAPTER XIV. CONCLUSION. [Sidenote: Vortices of national life.] At this point, where we are bringing our inquiries to a conclusion, we would fain look a little nearer into the mists which shroud the past, and descry, were it possible, the actual dawn of history for the individual nations; would see, not only how the larger bodies of men have travelled through the prehistoric stages of their journey, but how, having reached its settled home, each people begins to emerge from the obscurity that surrounds its early days. What were the exact means, we ask, whereby a collection of nomadic or half-nomadic tribes separated, reunited, separated again, and developed upon different soils the qualities which distinguish them from all others? What _is_, in fact, the beginning of real national life?