In favour of Young. In the year after this publication, Champollion published his Lettre à M. Dacier, in which he announced the phonetic powers of certain hieroglyphics and applied them to the reading of Greek and Roman proper names. Had he been candid enough to admit that he was indebted to Dr. Young for the commencement of his discovery, and only to claim the merit of extending and improving the alphabet, he would probably have bad his claims to the preceding and subsequent discoveries, which were certainly his own, more readily admitted by Englishmen than they have been. In 1819 Dr. Young had published his article "Egypt" in the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica; and it cannot be doubted that the analysis of the names Ptolemæus" and "Berenice," which it contained, reached Champollion in the interval between his publication in 1821 and 1822, and led him to alter his views. . . . . The Grammaire Egyptienne ought to have been given to the public as his sole bequest in the department of Egyptian philology. It was published from a manuscript written in 1831, immediately before his last illness. Shortly before his decease, having carefully collected the sheets, he delivered them to his brother, with the remark," Be careful of this; I trust that it will be my visiting card to posterity." Even the warmest admirers of Champollion must admit that he left his system in a very imperfect state. Few, probably, will deny that he held many errors to the close of his life, both in what respects the werden In favour of Champollion. Hieroglyphen genannt müssen.-EBERS, Aegypten in Bild und Wort; Leipzig, 1879, Bd. ii., s. 49. Un savant anglais du plus grand mérite, Th. Young, essaya de reconstituer l'alphabet des cartouches. De 1814 à 1818, il s'exerça sur les divers systèmes d'écriture égyptienne, et sépara mécaniquement les groupes différents dont se composaient le texte hiéroglyphique et le texte démotique de l'inscription de Rosette. Après avoir déterminé, d'une manière plus ou moins exacte, le sens de chacun d'eux, il en essaya la lecture. . . . . . . Ses idées étaient justes en partie, mais sa méthode imparfaite; il entrevit la terre promise, mais sans pouvoir y entrer. Le véritable initiateur fut François Champollion. MASPERO, Histoire Ancienne; Paris, 1886, pp. 729, 730. Ce fut en 1819, que le Dr. Young déclara le premier que les cartouches, ou encadrements elliptiques, dans le texte hiéroglyphique de l'inscription de Rosette, correspondaient aux noms propres grecs et particulièrement à celui de Ptolémée du texte grec, et aux groupes, du même nom, dans le texte intermédiaire en écriture égyptienne démotique ou vulgaire, groupes qui avaient été déjà reconnus et décomposés par MM. Silvestre de Sacy et Akerblad. Il allait encore plus loin en supposant que chaque signe du cartouche représentait un son du nom de Ptolémée et en cherchant à les définir réellement un à un par une analyse très inPlusieurs signes génieuse.. Seyffarth and others reject Cham pollion's system. In favour of Young. reading of the characters, and in In favour of Champollion. avaient été faussement interprétés et la preuve la plus évidente en était qu'il ne réussissait pas à lire d'autres noms que ceux de Ptolémée et de Bérénice. Il faut donc avouer que, malgré cette découverte, les opinions du Dr. Young, sur la nature du système hiéroglyphique, étaient encore essentiellement fausses et que cette découverte elle-même serait probablement restée infructueuse et à peine signalée comme découverte dans la science, si on avait suivi le chemin que son auteur lui-même avait proposé.-LEPSIUS, Lettre à M. le Professeur F. Rosellini sur l'Alphabet Hieroglyphique; Rome, 1837, p. II. It could hardly be expected that the system of decipherment proposed by Champollion would be accepted by those who had rival systems to put forth, hence we find old theories revived and new ideas brought to light side by side with Champollion's method of decipherment. Among those who attacked the new system were, Spolm, the misguided Seyffarth, Goulianoff and Klaproth. Spolm and Seyffarth divided hieroglyphics into emphonics, symphonics and aphonics, by which terms they seem to imply phonetics, enclitics and ideographics. Their hopelessly wrong theory was put forth with a great show of learning in De Lingua et Literis veterum Ægyptiorum at Leipzig, 1825–31. Goulianoff1 did not accept Champollion's system entirely, and he wished to consider the phonetic hieroglyphics acrologic; this also was the view taken by Klaproth, who bitterly attacked Champollion in his Lettre sur la découverte des hieroglyphes acrologiques, adressée à M. de Goulianoff, Paris, 1827, and also in his Examen critique des travaux de feu M. Champollion sur les Hieroglyphes, Paris, 1832. To the first of these two works Champollion published a reply entitled Analyse critique de la See his Essai sur les Hieroglyphes d'Horapollon, Paris, 1827. tence of lettre sur la découverte des hieroglyphes acrologiques par J. Klaproth (Extr. du Bulletin de Férussac), Paris, 1827, in which he showed the utter worthlessness of the theory. In 1830, when the correctness of Champollion's system was fully Persisdemonstrated, Janelli published at Naples his Fundamenta false Hermeneutica Hieroglyphicae, in three volumes, in which the systems of interpreold symbolic theory of the hieroglyphics was re-asserted! tation. and there were many who hesitated not to follow the views of François Ricardi, feu Charles d'Oneil, the soundness of which may be estimated by the title of one of his works, "Découverte des Hieroglyphes domestiques phonétiques par lesquels, sans sortir de chez soi, on peut deviner l'histoire, la chronologie (!!), le culte de tous les peuples anciens et modernes, de la même manière, qu'on le fait en lisant les hieroglyphes égyptiens selon la nouvelle méthode;" Turin, 1824.1 Little by little, however, Champollion's system was accepted. In 1835 Leemans published his edition of Horapollo, in which the results of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics were ably applied, and two years later Richard Lepsius published his famous Lettre à M. F. Rosellini sur l'alphabet hieroglyphique, wherein he discussed the whole question of the decipherment, and showed that Champollion's method was, without any question, correct. About this time students, who worked on Champollion's plan, sprang up in Holland, Italy, France and England, and the misguided Seyffarth alone continued down to 1855 to write and protest against the new system. AN EGYPTIAN FUNERAL. The funeral of a poor Egyptian was, probably, very much like that of one of the present day. After the body had been steeped for a short time in bitumen or natron, or perhaps merely rubbed with these substances, the few personal ornaments of the man were placed on it, he was wrapped in one 1 Another of his works was entitled, Triomphe sur les impies obtenu par les adorateurs de la très-sainte Trinité et du Verbe éternel, sous le gouvernement des sixième et septième rois d'Egypte au VIe siècle après le déluge. Sculpté en signes hieroglyphiques sur l'Obélisque Barberinus et maintenant expliqué; Geneva, 1821. tian burial. piece of linen, and with his staff to support his steps,' and his sandals to protect his weary feet in the nether-world, he was laid in a hole or cave, or even in the sand of the open descrt, to set out on his last journey. Trusting in the might of a few amulets that were buried with him, he feared not to meet his foes in the grave. The funeral of a king or a member of the royal family, or of a wealthy person, was a very magnificent ceremony, and it is, perhaps, impossible to realize exactly what an imposing sight it must have been. Treating of the burial of a king in Diodorus Egypt, Diodorus says (I. 72), that when a king died all the on Egyp, inhabitants of the country wept and rent their garments; the temples were closed, and the people abstained from sacrifices and celebrated no festival for a period of seventy-two days. Crowds of men and women, about two or three hundred in number, went round about the streets with mud on their heads, and with their garments knotted like girdles below the breasts (σινδόνας ὑποκάτω τῶν μαστών), singing dirges twice daily in praise of the dead. They denied themselves wheat, they ate no animal food, and they abstained from wine and dainty fare. No one dared to make use of baths, or unguents, or to recline upon couches, or even to partake of the pleasures of love. The seventy-two days were passed in grief and mourning as for the death of a beloved child. Meanwhile, the funeral paraphernalia was made ready, and on the last day of mourning, the body, placed in a coffin, was laid at the entrance to the tomb, and according to law, judgment was passed upon the acts of the king during his life. Every one had the power to make an accusation against the king. The priests pronounced a funeral oration over the body, and declared the noble works of the king during his life, and if the opinion of the assembled multitude agreed with that of the priests, and the king had led a blameless life, they testified their approval openly; if, on the other hand, the life of the king had been a bad one, they expressed their disapprobation by loud murmurs. Through the opposition of the people many kings have been deprived of meet and proper burial, Compare Psalm xxiii. 4. and kings are accustomed to exercise justice, not only Diodorus on Egypbecause they fear the disapprobation of their subjects, but tian burial. also because they fear that after death their bodies may be maltreated, and their memory cursed for ever. It is very doubtful if the above description of the mourning is not somewhat exaggerated, and there appears to be no authority in Egyptian inscriptions for the statement that many kings were deprived of their meet and proper burial because of the disapproval of their past lives shown by the people. This account by Diodorus is more valuable for the indication of the great and solemn respect which was shown to dead kings, as sons of the god Rã, and as lords of the land of Egypt, than for its strict accuracy of detail. The customs observed at the burial of kings would be respectfully imitated at the funerals of the nobles and officials of his court, and the account by the same writer of what happened after the mummy of an Egyptian gentleman was prepared for burial, must next be considered. According to Diodorus (I. 92), when the body is ready to be buried, the relatives give notice to the judges and the friends of the deceased, and inform them that the funeral will take place on a certain day, and that the body will pass over the lake; and straightway the judges, forty in number,1 come and scat themselves in a semi-circle above the lake. Then the men who have been commissioned to prepare a boat called ẞâpis, bring it to the lake, and they set it afloat under the charge of a pilot called Charon. And they pretend that Orpheus travelling in Egypt in ancient times, was present at a ceremony of this kind, and that he drew his fable of the infernal regions partly from his remembrance of this Is it possible that Diodorus has confused the forty judges at the lake with the forty-two judges or assessors of the Book of the Dead, before each of whom the deceased was supposed to declare that he had not committed a certain sin? 3 Wiedemann compares the Egyptian kare, "Schiffer." The dictionaries give Δ qare, a "ship," and qăre, "coach |