of the ancient Egyptian religion from the papyri and other native records; but it is also true that during the reigns of these two Ptolemies that the Egyptians were firmly kept in obscurity, and that the ancient priest-college of Heliopolis was suppressed. A century or two after the Christian era, Greek had obtained such a hold upon the inhabitants of Egypt that the Egyptian Christians, the followers and disciples of St. Mark, were obliged to use the Greek alphabet to write down the Egyptian, that is to say Coptic translation of the books of the Old and New Testaments.

The letters, sh, q, f, b, x, &, ḥ, 6, č, 2, 8, were

added from the demotic forms of hieratic characters to represent sounds which were unknown in the Greek language. During the Greek rule over Egypt many of the hieroglyphic characters had new phonetic values given to them; by this time the knowledge of hieroglyphic writing had practically died out.

The history of the decipherment of hieroglyphics is of great interest, but no thorough account of it can be given here; only the most important facts connected with it can be mentioned. During the XVIth–XVIIIth centuries many attempts were made by scholars to interpret the hieroglyphic inscriptions then known to the world, but they resulted in nothing useful. The fact is they did not understand the nature of the problem to be solved, and they failed to perceive the use of the same hieroglyphic character as a phonetic or determinative in the same inscription. In 1799, a French officer discovered at Bolbitane or Rosetta a basalt slab inscribed in the hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek characters; it was shortly after captured by the English army, and taken to London, where it was carefully examined by Dr. Thomas Young.*

* Thomas Young was born at Milverton, in Somersetshire, on the 13th of June, 1773; both his parents were Quakers. At the age of fourteen he is said to have been versed in Greek, Latin, French,

The Society of Antiquaries published a fac-simile of the inscription, which was distributed among scholars, and Silvestre de Sacy and Akerblad made some useful dis coveries about certain parts of the demotic version of the inscription. Dr. Young was enabled, ten years after, to make translations of the three inscriptions, and the results of his studies were published in 1821. In 1822 M. Champollion* (Le Jeune) published a translation of the same inscriptions, and was enabled to make out something like an alphabet. There appears to be no doubt that he was greatly helped by the publications and labours of Young, who had succeeded in grouping certain words in demotic, and in assigning ac curate values to some of the Egyptian characters used in writing the names of the Greek rulers of Egypt. Young made many mistakes, but some of his work was of value. Champollion, to whom the credit of definitely settling the phonetic values of several signs really belongs, had been carefully grounded in the Coptic language, and was therefore enabled with little difficulty to recognize the hieroglyphic forms of the words which were familiar to him in Coptic; Young had no such advantage. Champollion's system was subjected to many attacks, but little by little it gained ground, and the labours of other scholars have

Italian, Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. He took his degree of M.D. in July, 1796, in 1802 he was appointed professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, and in 1810 he was elected physician to St. George's Hospital. He was not, however, a popular physician. He died on the 10th of May, 1829.

* Jean François le Jeune Champollion was born at Figeac, department Du Lot, in 1796. He was educated at Grenoble, and afterwards at Paris, where he devoted himself to the study of Coptic. In the year 1824 he was ordered by Charles X. to visit all the important collections of Egyptian antiquities in Europe. On his return he was appointed Director of the Louvre. In 1828 he was sent on a scientific mission to Egypt, and was afterwards made professor of Egyptian antiquities at the Collège de France. He died in 1831.

proved that he was right. The other early workers in the field of hieroglyphics were Dr. Samuel Birch in England; Dr. Lepsius in Germany, and MM. Rosellini and Salvolini in Italy. The study of hieroglyphics has become comparatively general, and each year sees books of texts published, learned papers on Egyptian grammar written, and translations made into the various European languages.

In hieroglyphic inscriptions the signs are used in two ways: I, IDEOGRAPHIC, II, PHONETIC. In the ideographic system a word is expressed by a picture or ideograph thus:

www.mau, 'water'; in the phonetic system the same word is @ m + ã + u, no regard being paid to

written

the fact that

arm, and @

represents an owl,

a rope. Similarly

the ideographic system, but

a hand and fore

emsuḥ is a 'crocodile' in phonetically it is written

m + s + u + ḥ. The ideographic system is

probably older than the phonetic.

PHONETIC signs are: I, ALPHABETIC, as

u; or II, SYLLABIC, as mer, xeper,

m,

|

S,

◇; the sign † nefer can be written

The scribes took pains to represent the exact value of these syllabic signs in order that no mistake might be made.

The IDEOGRAPHIC signs are also used as determinatives, and are placed after words written phonetically to determine their meaning. For example, nem means 'to sleep,' 'to walk,' 'to go back,' ' to become infirm,' 'tongue'

and 'again'; without a determinative the meaning of this word in a sentence would be easily mistaken. Determinatives are of two kinds: I, ideographic, and II, màu, ‘cat,’a cat,

generic. Thus after

written; this is an ideographic determinative. After

A

was

kerḥ, 'darkness,' the night sky with a star in it, , was written; this is a generic determinative. A word has frequently more than one determinative; for example, in the word bāḥ, to overflow,'

is

a determinative of the sound bāḥ; www. is a determinative of water, of a lake or collection of water, and of ground. The list of hieroglyphic signs with their phonetic values given on pp. 61-68 will be of use in reading kings' names, etc.; for convenience however the hieroglyphic alphabet is added here. The system of transliteration of Egyptian characters used in this book is that most generally adopted.

The number of hieroglyphic characters is about two thousand.

The forms of the numbers 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 are not known exactly.

Hieroglyphic inscriptions are usually to be read in the opposite direction to which the characters face; there is however no hard and fast rule in this matter. On the papyri they are read in various directions, and there are instances in which the ancient copyist mistook the end of a