That was the birth of the ALPHABET, one of the greatest and most momentous triumphs of the human mind. The earliest phonograms represented syllables, not individual letters, the distinguishing signs for vowels and consonants being of yet later introduction; in fact, some alphabets, notably the Hebrew and other Semitic, have no true vowels, but only distinguishing marks, diacritical points as they are called, to denote them. To recapitulate, we have 1, picture-writing; 2, ideograms; 3, phonograms representing words; 4, phonograms representing syllables; 5, alphabetic characters. From their four hundred verbal phonograms and syllabic signs the Egyptians of a remote age--for it is literally true "that the letters of the alphabet are older than the Pyramids"--appear to have selected at the outset forty-five symbols for alphabetic use, but the rare occurrence or special use of some of these caused a further reduction to twenty-five letters. "All that remained to be done was to take one simple step--boldly to discard all the non-alphabetic elements, at once to sweep away the superfluous lumber, rejecting all the ideograms, the homophones, the polyphones, the syllables, and the symbolic signs to which the Egyptian scribes so fondly clung, and so to leave revealed in its grand simplicity the nearly perfect alphabet, of which, without knowing it, the Egyptians had been virtually in possession for almost countless ages." (Taylor, i. 68.) That step they never took, but continued the use of eye-pictures side by side with that of ear-pictures, instead of passing to the use of fixed signs for certain sounds.