The last century of our Era witnessed two of the most important achievements of human ingenuity in relation to literature: the decipherment of the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform script of Assyria and Babylonia. Both these remarkable achievements are credited to the last century and have added immeasurably to our knowledge of early historical times, corroborated and confirmed much that was obscure and uncertain of the Bible narrative and its teaching, and opened up to the gaze of all men for all time to come the most valuable records of a vast period of human history which otherwise would have remained in unrelieved obscurity. These achievements were the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone and the cuneiform writing. The hieroglyphic writing was of two classes; called _ideographic_ in which ideas were denoted by signs or pictures and _phonetic_ wherein sounds represented ideas. In the ideographic hieroglyphs which were the older--this being the parent writing--the picture of an object expressed the idea of or represented the object itself. A fish, _e. g._, was denoted by the outline drawing of a fish; an obelisk by the picture of that object; a vulture by the delineation of that bird, and so on. Sometimes, however, the cause was put for the effect, and vice versa: thus a palette and reed would commonly represent "writing"; it might also represent a "scribe." Dishevelled hair might represent "grieving," because in the time of trouble the hair of the head would be apt to be disturbed and uncared for. At a later date these ideographic hieroglyphics or pictures representing ideas, by a process of development from the basis of pure primitive picture writing, or by the association and suggestion which one thing gave to another or to other things, or by a species of conventionalization, came to represent _sounds_;--not letters but words or parts of words. Thus came into existence the other class of hieroglyph-writing--the "phonetic" hieroglyphics.