Early South Indian Palaeography c8.s2.28

c8.s2.28

Quite often, particularly in the earliest days of pictography, "the pictures simply recalled the objects to the mind; the special and particular meaning of the record had to be devised through a process of mental equation".⁴⁶ Even later a good number of signs, occurring, as for instance, along with hieroglyphic words, graphically picture human or animal forms or their parts Thus, beside the word spelt fully with the proper phonetic hieroglyphs there is a pictorial index sign "more fully to define its meaning".⁴⁷ Thus while in simple pictography, any figure stands for the object it represents, and its real meaning may be easily guessed, in complex representations, as they go beyond mere imitation there is great difficulty to discriminate their true import. A good knowledge of the signs, symbols and determinatives used is necessary for any correct interpretation.⁴⁸ E.B. Tylor illustrates this problem well:—"When the tortoise is put to represent land, it is no longer a mere imitation but has become an emblem or symbol. And where the bird is drawn to mean not a real king-fisher, but a man of that name, we see the first step toward phonetic writing or sound writing, the principle of which is to make a picture stand for the sound of a spoken word. How man may have made the next move toward writing may be learnt from the common child's game of *rebus*, that is writing words 'by things'. Like many other games, this one keeps up in child's sport what in earlier ages was man's earnest. Thus if one writes the word 'waterman' by a picture of a water-jug and a man, this is drawing the meaning of the word in a way hardly beyond the American Indian's picture of the king-fisher. But it is very different when in a child's book of puzzles one finds the drawing of a water-can, a man being shot, and a date-fruit, this representing in *rebus* the word 'can-di-date'. For now what the pictures have come to stand for is no longer their meaning, but their mere sound. This is true phonetic writing, though of a rude kind, and shows how the practical art of writing really came to be invented".⁴⁹