176 



On the Recent Elucidations of early Egyptian History. 



SixXCE the commencement of the present century, the researches 

 of philologists have ascertained that the language of ancient 

 Egypt, — the language of the hieroglyphical inscriptions engraven 

 on its ancient temples and monuments, and of the still existing 

 manuscripts of the same period,-*— differs from the modern 

 Egyptian or Coptic, only in the mixture in the latter of many 

 Greek and Arabian and a smaller portion of Latin words, in- 

 troduced during the successive dominion of the Gl^eks, the 

 Romans, and the Arabs, and occasionally substituted for the 

 corresponding native words. The grammatical construction of 

 the language has remained the same at all periods of its employ- 

 ment : and it finally ceased to be a spoken language towards 

 the middle of the seventeenth century, when it was replaced 

 by the Arabian. 



In writing their language, the ancient Egyptians employed 

 three different kinds of characters. First, figurative ; or repre- 

 sentations of the objects themselves. Second, symbolic ; or re- 

 presentations of certain physical or material objects, expressing 

 metaphorically, or conventionally, certain ideas ; such as, a people 

 obedient to their king, figured, metaphorically, by a bee ; the uni- 

 verse, conventionally, by a beetle. Third, phonetic^ or represen- 

 tative of sounds; that is to say, strictly alphabetical characters. 

 The phonetic signs were also portraits of physical and mate- 

 rial objects ; and each stood for the initial sound of the word in 

 the Egyptian language which expressed the object pourtrayed-: 

 thus a lion was the sound L, because a lion was called Labo ; 

 and a hand a T, because a hand was called Tot. The form 

 in which these objects were presented, when employed as 

 phonetic characters, was conventional, and definite ta distin- 

 guish them from the same objects used either figuratively 

 or symbolically ; thus, the conventional form of the pho- 

 netic T was the hand open and outstretched; in any other 

 form the hand would either be a figurative, or a symbohc sign. 

 The number of distinct characters employed as phonetic signs 

 appears to have been about 120; consequently many were 

 homophones, or having the same signification. The three kinds 

 of characters were used indiscriminately in the same writing, 



