Women as well as men learned to read and write, and in Semitic times this involved a knowledge of the extinct Sumerian as well as of a most complicated and extensive syllabary.
Iwleanwhile an inquirer is confronted by the strange fact that of three neighboring countries between which frequent communication existed, one (China) never deviated from an ideographic script; another (Korea) invented an alphabet, and the third (Japan) devised a syllabary.
At last, the central advanced tribes made the names of the abbreviated pictures useful in other connexions, and were far on the way to a syllabary.
Fourth on my list of reasons why today is a Good Day is my progress with hiragana, the primary Japanese syllabary.
The Babylonian syllabary which thus arose, and which, as the culture passed on to the north - known as Assyria - became the Babylonian Assyrian syllabary, 3 was enlarged and modified in the course of time, the Semitic equivalents for many of the signs being distorted or abbreviated to form the basis of new "phonetic" values that were thus of " Semitic " origin; but, on the whole, the " non-Semitic " character of the signs used as syllables in the phonetic method of writing Semitic words was preserved; and, furthermore, down to the latest days of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires the mixed method of writing continued, though there were periods when " purism " was the fashion, and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously in preference to using signs with a phonetic complement as an aid in suggesting the reading desired in any given instance.
