It may be presumed that crude methods of sending messages, not unlike this of the Scythians, were practised more or less independently, and with greater or less degrees of elaboration, by barbaric and half-civilised tribes everywhere. The familiar case of the American Indians, who were wont to send a belt of wampum and an arrow as a declaration of war, is an illustration in point. The gap between such a presentation of tangible objects and the use of crude pictures to replace the objects themselves would not seem, from a civilised standpoint, to be a very wide one. Yet no doubt it was an enormously difficult gap to cross. Granted the idea, any one could string together the frog, the bird, the mouse, and the arrows, but only here and there a man would possess the artistic skill requisite to make fairly recognisable pictures of these objects. It is true that the cave man of a vastly earlier period had developed a capacity to draw the outlines of such animals as the reindeer and the mammoth with astonishing verisimilitude. Professor Sayce has drawn the conclusion from this that the average man dwelling in the caves of France at that remote epoch could draw as well as the average Frenchman of to-day; but a moment’s consideration will make it clear that the facts in hand by no means warrant so sweeping a conclusion. There is nothing to show, nor is there any reason to believe, that the cave-dweller pictures that have come down to us are the work of average men of that period. On the contrary, it is much more likely that they were the work, not of average men, but of the artistic geniuses of their day,--of the Michelangelos, Raphaels, or if you prefer, the Landseers, the Bonheurs, and Corots of their time. There is no more reason to suppose that the average cave dweller could have drawn the reindeer hunting scene or the famous picture of the mammoth, than that the average Frenchman of to-day could have painted the _Horse Fair_. There is no reason then to suppose that the average Scythian could have made himself equally intelligible to Darius by drawing pictures instead of sending actual objects, though quite possibly there were some men among the Scythian hordes who could have done so. The idea of such pictorial ideographs had seemingly not yet come to the Scythians, but that idea had been attained many centuries before by other people of a higher plane of civilisation. At least four thousand years before the age of Darius, the Babylonians, over whose descendants the Persian king was to rule, had invented or developed a picture-writing and elaborated it until it was able to convey, not merely vague generalities, but exquisite shades of meaning. The Egyptians, too, at a period probably at least as remote, had developed what seems an independent system of picture-writing, and brought it to an astonishing degree of perfection.