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 + ā + u, no regard being paid to

written

the fact that

arm, and @

represents an owl,

a hand and fore

a rope. Similarly

emsuḥ is a 'crocodile' in phonetically it is written

the ideographic system, but

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

probably older than the phonetic.

PHONETIC signs are: I, ALPHABETIC, as

u; or II, SYLLABIC, as I mer,

The signxeper can be written 1,

xeper,

m,

hetep.

; 2,

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,

generic. Thus after 44 màu, ‘cat, a cat,

written; this is an ideographic determinative. After

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; 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. 62-69 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 twc 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

chapter for its beginning, and copied the whole of it in the reverse order. Some inscriptions are to be read in perpendicular lines.

The following transliterated and translated extract from the first page of the "Tale of the Two Brothers" will explain the foregoing statements.

There were once on a time brothers two [the children]