yS TRAXS. ST. LOUIS ACAD. SCIEXCE. 



Benfey's book appeared in 1S44, i.e. eighteen years after my Ru- 

 dimenta, it is another misstatement what the truth-loving Brugsch 

 says in his Dictionary, vol. iv. Pref., " that his friend Benfey 

 ('y^gyptische und Semitische Sprache,' 1844), first of all^ had 

 demonstrated the affinity of the Coptic with the Hebrew." Be- 

 sides, Benfey has not at all reduced Coptic words to Hebrew 

 roots, as 1 have done, but acquiesced in paragoning a small num- 

 ber of Coptic particles with Hebrew ones. The Hebrew words 

 which appear in Brugsch's Dictionary are to a great extent the 

 same which I had determined a long time before, e.g. in my 

 Theologische Schriften, pp. 117, 118; and I admire the sagacity 

 by which Brugsch, totally ignorant of the Hebrew, derived, e.g. 

 TGfi, the finger, from yai'S (eqhba), finger, as I have done in the 

 said place. It is not my intention to whitewash a great mass of 

 blunders obvious in my " Rudimenta," but their substance was 

 and will be true for all time to come, namely, that the hierogly- 

 phic literature was not an ideologic but a syllabic writing ; that 

 regularly each of the 630 hieroglyphs signified the consonants 

 contained in the name of the figure, and that the language of the 

 ancient Egyptian was the ancient Coptic, allied to the Hebrew 

 and the primitive Chaldaic language.* 



We come now to another calumniator of my system, a new . 

 propagator of Champollion's imaginings, namely, Prof. Ebers, in 

 Leipzig. This perfect pupil of Lepsius has not hesitated to de- 

 clare, in all his public and private lectures, Champollion's system 

 to be the key to the whole Egyptian literature, but my own to be 

 the greatest nonsense. These attacks have been repeated even 

 in New York papers. Well, then, Champollion's theory being 

 the key to the whole Egyptian literature. Prof. Ebers will be so 



* A very clear example exhibiting Brugsch's natural instinct is the following. In 1826, 

 I discovered on a Turin altar the first geography of ancient Egypt, the basis of Brugsch's 

 geographical researches, which was published in the author's Astronomia ^g. etc. 1833, 

 PI. II., No. 2. Brugsch had never seen this catalogue of sevent3'-two Egyptian cities, and 

 yet in his Egyptian Geography, 1857, vol. i., pi. 57, an exact copj- of the names of the same 

 cities will be found. Since, then, Brugsch regularly praises the smallest supposed discov- 

 eries of a Champollionist; since he has repeatedly declared all my discoveries to be " vana 

 ficta"; since he did not mention with so much as a word who discovered the geographical 

 altar of Turin, — it is evident that he intended to appropriate my little discoveni-. No honest 

 man knowingly takes the property of another, and nobody strips foreign feathers to deco- 

 rate his own black habit. Will he publicly confess his calumny that my Egyptian studies 

 are " vana ficta " ? 



