understand the meaning of such messages.

Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The
clever people of the Nile had passed beyond that stage long
before. Their pictures meant a great deal more than the object
which they represented, as I shall try to explain to you now.

Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were
examining a stack of papyrus sheets, all covered with hieroglyphics.
Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with
a saw. ``Very well,'' you would say, ``that means of course that
a farmer went out to cut down a tree.'' Then you take another
papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age
of eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture
of the man with the saw. Queens of eighty-two do not handle
saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But
what?

That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved.
He discovered that the Egyptians were the first to use what
we now call ``phonetic writing''--a system of characters which
reproduce the ``sound'' (or phone) of the spoken word and
which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words
into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes
and pothooks.

Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw.
The word ``saw'' either means a certain tool which you will find
in a carpenter's shop, or it means the past tense of the verb
``to see.''