on the contrary, preserved the purely pictorial and artistic character of their hieroglyphs to the end. The hieroglyphs were a decoration in themselves; their very position in the sentence was subordinate to the decorative effect. The Egyptian could not be guilty of the barbarism seen on some of the Assyrian sculpture, where inscriptions were scrawled right across the work without regard to design. So far was this idea carried that many words or ideas were represented by two distinct characters, one wide and the other narrow and deep, so that the harmony of the design should not be broken by an unsuitable element. The result was that the Egyptians were rewarded by having the most beautiful writing in the world." (_Egyptian Decorative Art_, p. 4.) This writing exists in three groups of characters (fig. 45): (_a_) _Hieroglyphic_, (_b_) _Hieratic_, (_c_) _Demotic_. The demotic is derived from the hieratic, and the hieratic from the hieroglyphic. [Illustration: Fig. 45.--Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic Signs for Man] (_a_) Pictogram, ideogram, and phonogram--in other words, signs representative of word, idea, and sound--make up the seventeen hundred _hieroglyphs_ which, in the older signs, preserve the traces of their origin in rude picture-writing. They were chiselled on stone of various kinds, cut or painted on wood or plaster, and written on papyrus or skin; the characters being arranged in vertical columns. With the quickened zeal of modern excavators discoveries come apace, so that before these words are printed, some additional find, throwing all others into the shade, may come to light. Such, for example, would be the production of epigraphic evidence as to the sojourn and oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, and their escape from that "house of bondage." For a long time the earliest known example of hieroglyphic writing which the Gizeh and Ashmodean Museums could show (each institution possessing fragments of the relic) was a mutilated stele or monumental tablet to the memory of Shera, a priest or grandson of Sent, the fifth king of the Second Dynasty, which, adopting Professor Flinders Petrie's chronology, flourished about four thousand five hundred years B.C. In this record three alphabetic characters are employed to spell that monarch's name. But in November 1897, Dr. Borchardt reported the important discovery that the royal tomb found by M. de Morgan in the spring of that year at Nagada, situated opposite Coptos, a little north of Thebes, is that of Menes, the founder of the First Dynasty, whose date Professor Flinders Petrie fixes at 4777 B.C., "with a possible error of a century." Calcined remains of the body are now in the Gizeh Museum, and, among other objects, the broken fragments of an ivory plaque which, when joined, showed the _ka_ name of Aha (the _ka_ being the "double" or "other self" of the deceased which abode with the mummy), and, attached thereto, the name MN = Menes, borne by the Pharaoh during his lifetime.