The art of writing has grown up gradually and very slowly, for when the inhabitants of the Earth became numerous they felt the need of some way of expressing themselves to those at a distance from them, and for making a record of things that happened and might be forgotten. Some of the earliest means of writing were by pictures, like the picture writings of Mexico[22] found by the Spanish conquerors, and something of the same kind is even now used by the Chinese and Japanese. Their writing is made up partly of pictures and partly of queer signs which stand for the names of things, as you know if you have ever seen one of their books. One of the oldest forms of writing known is the hieroglyphic, which is said to have been first used by the Egyptians about 2,100 years before Christ, and another is the arrow-shaped writing of the Assyrians. These were cut on stone and metal tablets, and most of them are the histories of their kings. But there are some writings on stone in India which are thought to be older still. The Egyptians made great progress in writing afterwards when _papyrus_ was invented.[23] This is a kind of paper made from a reed which grows abundantly in the river Nile, and many of these papyrus writings are preserved in the British Museum, as well as the writings on stone of the Egyptians and Assyrians, and learned men have spelled out a great deal of the history of these nations from them, though the language is quite different from any spoken or written now. Picture writing was most likely one of the earliest inventions in this way: but it was so troublesome that signs were used to express the same things as the picture. For instance, suppose a history of a king was to be written. The word “king” would be shown by something he always wore, such as his crown, and this sign would become more simple until at last it might not be anything like a crown; but it would be remembered that the sign stood for a king all the same. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, _aleph_, means an ox, and the letter is something like the shape of the head of that animal with its horns; and another letter, called _shin_, which in Hebrew means a tooth, is actually very like a tooth with three points. In many languages these signs have become so altered that they do not now resemble the things they at first stood for; but the first steps in the invention of written language were certainly made by signs representing the thing of which the person wished to give an idea. But you will learn all about these ancient writings from other books.