Yet another people, the Chinese, made the advance from

1 Brasseur, ' Relation des Choses de Yucatan de Diego de Landa ' etc. • Paris and
London, 1864.
PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 99

pictures to phonetic writing, and it was perhaps because of the
peculiar character of their spoken language that they did it in
so different a way. The whole history of their art of writing
still lies open to us. They began by drawing the plainest
outlines of sun, moon, tortoise, fish, boy, hatchet, tree, dog,
and so forth, and thus forming characters which are still extant,
and are known as the Ku-ivan, or "ancient pictures." 1 Such
pictures, though so much altered that, were not their ancient
forms still to be seen, it would hardly be safe to say they had
ever been pictures at all, are still used to some extent in Chinese
writing, as in the characters for man, sun, moon, tree, etc.
