Modern Attempts at Investigation.

After all, the religion of the Egyptians was not confined to the worship of the sacred animals. Herodotos, Plato and other classical writers, mention Amon, Osiris, Isis, Thoth, Neith and other divinities; and the belief in the soul's immortality is not only decidedly ascribed to the Egyptians, but is said to have been first taught by them. What relations did the various parts of this religion bear to each other? Was the religion in its later ages identical with the primitive religion of the country? Had there been advance or retrogression ? The solution of these and many other obvious questions was quite impossible until very recently. The learned Brücker, in his Critical History of Philosophy, and Jablonski, in his Pantheon Aegyptiacum, have with indefatigable industry put together all the evidence that can be found in Greek and Latin writers. But they had no means of testing this evidence. No history can be learnt with certainty except from evidence contemporaneous with the events recorded; no religion can be studied with profit except in the very words of its own votaries. But the knowledge of the Egyptian language had not only actually perished, but the key to the decipherment of its writings was supposed to be irrecoverably lost. The hieroglyphic characters, consisting of representations of the sun, moon, animals, plants and other objects, either natural or

artificial, which are painted or sculptured upon so many Egyptian monuments, were indeed looked upon as symbols under which the mysteries of the religion had been concealed from the vulgar, and several attempts were made to explain them. All these efforts, however, were destitute of any scientific basis. The most elaborate attempts proceeded from the learned Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, who is not without merit as one of the restorers of Coptic; but his enormous folios upon hieroglyphic inscriptions are mere memorials of a frightful amount of time and thought elaborately wasted. Every hieroglyphic sign was supposed to represent an idea; and groups which we now know to stand for the names and titles of the Roman emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, are converted into long sentences of mystical rubbish. Even at the beginning of the present century, the Chevalier Palin indulged in dreams not unworthy of Athanasius Kircher. Dr. Birch has briefly described his views as follows. He "did not hesitate to assert that it was only necessary to translate the Psalms of David into Chinese, and write them in the ancient characters of that language, in order to reproduce the Egyptian papyri, and that these contained many Biblical books."

Spurious monuments served the purposes of these interpreters quite as well as genuine ones. In the "Isiac table" Kircher discovered a variety of sacred

mysteries favourable to Christianity; Pegnorius read in it precepts of moral and political wisdom. Another critic (Jablonski) considered it as a calendar of festivals; whilst a fourth attempted to persuade the learned world that "these characters described the properties and use of the magnet, and of the mariner's compass."

Decipherment of Hieroglyphic Writing.

The discovery of the Rosetta stone put an end to all this guess-work. Most of you have probably seen this stone in the British Museum. It is a tablet of black basalt, about three feet long by about two and a half wide, and was erected in honour of Ptolemy Epiphanes, 193 years before Christ. The inscriptions upon it are in three distinct characters, the third of which is Greek. The Greek text consists of a decree in honour of the king, and it is expressly stated in the last line that this decree is to be engraved on the tablet, roîs Te iepoîs καὶ ἐγχωρίοις καὶ ἐλληνικοῖς γράμμασιν, " in the sacred characters, in the vernacular and in Greek." The tablet is unfortunately mutilated, great part of the hieroglyphic portion is lost, and so is the end of the Greek. Fifteen lines of the enchorial or (as it is now generally called) demotic part have lost their first letters or words.

The conditions of the problem to be solved were now of a very definite kind. The inquirer, instead of guessing at the sense of the hieroglyphic text, had the sense

supplied to him. His problem lay in dividing the hieroglyphic text into groups or words corresponding to the Greek words. The problem would be completely solved if each Egyptian group were successfully analyzed and read, the verification of the result being found in the facility of reading and interpreting other texts by means of the alphabet and vocabulary thus obtained.

Several of the most eminent scholars in Europe attempted the problem, and some of them even with partial success. The great orientalist Silvestre de Sacy determined the demotic groups corresponding to Ptolemy, Berenike, Alexander and other proper names; and the Swedish scholar Akerblad already, in the year 1802, even drew up a phonetic alphabet of the demotic characters, which is remarkably correct as far as it goes. The complete key to the decipherment of Egyptian was, however, not revealed to the world till the publication of Champollion's letter to M. Dacier in the September of 1822.

Dr. Young.

It is even to this day a common habit of Englishmen to couple the name of their countryman Dr. Thomas Young with that of Champollion, as sharing with him the glory of this discovery. No person who knows anything of Egyptian philology can countenance so gross an error. Dr. Young was indeed a man of extra

ordinary genius, but the true direction of it was long unrecognized by those very countrymen of his who ridiculously put him forward as a rival of Champollion. "It fell to his lot," as Professor Tyndall has said, "to discover facts in Optics which Newton's theory was incompetent to explain; and he finally succeeded in placing on an immovable basis the Undulatory Theory of Light." Helmholtz, a kindred genius, thus speaks of him: "His was one of the most profound minds that the world has ever seen." But it is not true that he discovered the key to the decipherment of hieroglyphics, or even that his labours assisted Champollion in the discovery. When the key was once discovered and recognized as the true one, it was found that one or two of Young's results were correct. But there was nothing in his method or theory by which he or any one else could distinguish between his right and his wrong results, or which could lead him or any one else a single step in advance. Young was certainly right in assuming that the first two signs in the hieroglyphic name of Ptolemy1 were P and T, but his next step was a failure, and so was the next after that. He did not succeed in analyzing this royal name or that of Berenike. All his other attempts were simple failures. "He mistook Autokrator for Arsinoe, and Cæsar for

1 That the oval rings contained royal names was first pointed out by the Danish scholar Zoega, who was also the first in modern times to assert that some hieroglyphic characters were phonetic.