If you can imagine a time when writing was unknown, and when there was need to send communications from one to another, and that these communications must not be known to the bearer of the message, how would you set about doing it? Well, one way, at least, of doing it would be by sending signs marked on papyrus or parchment or on a slate, or whatever you might have convenient for making marks on, and to hope that the man you were sending them to would be clever enough to understand what you meant, and that the man by whom you were sending them would not. And if you wanted to send a message about any particular thing, the most easy and obvious way to begin would be by making a simple drawing of that thing. So, if you wanted to send a message about a bird, you would draw the figure, or outline, of a bird. If you wanted to send a message about an eye, a human eye, you might draw the figure of an eye. I suggest these two things because they are two of the most simple figures that actually do appear in the picture-writing which is the old Egyptian hieroglyphic. {37} Now we can go a step farther. The eye is the thing that we see with. Therefore, if we want to send a message to our friend and tell him that we "see a bird," if we put the picture of an eye, which is the organ of sight, and a bird next to it, our friend, if he is at all intelligent, may understand the message to mean "I see a bird." [Sidenote: Three kinds of writing] That, or something like that, may have been--I do not say that it was, but I think it most likely--the way in which this picture-writing began. I ought not to call it picture-writing, really, for it was not that. _Hieros_ is Greek for sacred, or for a priest; _glyphein_ is Greek for to grave, or engrave. So hieroglyphic meant sacred characters engraved; that is, cut in on stone. The word for the sacred writing was hieratic, meaning simply sacred, without the meaning of engraving. The hieratic was written on papyrus. It was derived from the hieroglyphic, the hieroglyphic being the older, but it was not quite the same because the pictures, so to call them, had become a good deal simplified so that they could be drawn much more quickly. The figures were not so carefully made, and certain signs, sometimes not very like the original figures, came to be understood as representing these figures.