Rev. Edward Hincks on the Egyptian Stele, or Tablet. 55 



to him. Sometimes the tablet is without a speech, the inscription closing at the 

 end of C ; and sometimes it begins with C, containing only the name and 

 description of the deceased person and his speech. In a few tablets, the prefatory 

 matter before C is somewhat different from the above ; but the form given above 

 is much the most usual. 



I now remark, in the first place, that no record of facts, and, in short, 

 nothing which would not answer equally well for any tablet, is to be expected 

 till we come to C. The part before this is only valuable, as it may aid us 

 in the study of the language, and as it may lead us to know the age of the tablet, 

 supposing it to be without a date. To assist in this, I propose the following 

 criteria, the result of a careful examination of a great number of tablets of 

 known age. 



1. If the lowermost of the two central introductory characters be omitted, the 

 semicircle being placed over the triangle, the tablet may be presumed to be of 

 the most remote antiquity. This is the case in the tablets, which have been 

 found in the neighbourhood of the pyramids, and which bear the names of their 

 builders, Cheoph (p]ln) ^^^ Kephren (i^ioy!^). But if the introductory charac- 

 ters, being all present, be grouped in a different manner from what I have 

 represented above, the tablet is not of very great antiquity. I speak, of course, 

 comparatively. I mean, that I have met with no tablets, in which the initial 

 group was differently arranged, which there was any reason to suppose anterior 

 to the so called eighteenth dynasty. 



2. If the initial group be followed by the preposition N to, the tablet can 

 have no pretensions to antiquity : it is probably Ptolemaic or Roman. 



3. If the names of more than one deity are combined in the space A, the 

 tablet is not of the most remote antiquity. The earliest dated tablet, in which 

 I have met this combination of divine names, is of the thirteenth year of 

 Amenemhe II., the king whose cartouche was the first on the second line of 

 the tablet of Abydos, at the time when that tablet was first copied. It has 

 since, I believe, been broken off. If more than one deity be mentioned in 

 tablets more ancient than this, the initial group is repeated for each ; being, 

 however, sometimes mutilated at its commencement for all after the first. 



4. The mention of Osiris- Apis, or Apis-Osiris, the Serapis of the Romans, 

 among the deities enumerated in A, is a proof that the tablet is Ptolemaic or 



