SEYFFARTH — EGYPTIAN THEOLOGY. 7 I 



7. The Egyptians were not very scrupulous in expressing 

 similar-sounding elements of the ancient dialects ; they expressed, 

 e.g., the letters ^, o, st, n, '(g), 2, rr (gh), p, by the same hiero- 

 glyphs (Rudimenta, p. 23). Besides, the Egyptians distinguished 

 the sexes of the animals, and changed some original names of the 

 latter in later times, e.g., t-Hpi (the child) into ujHpi, to the effect 

 that some hieroglyphs represented different letters in different 

 times. 



As soon as my discovery was (though imperfectly) published, 

 in 1826, and my syllabic hieroglyphs were sent out, in 1S45, the 

 Champollionists clandestinely appropriated the substance of my 

 theory and my syllabic hieroglyphs, first Lepsius, then Brugsch, 

 then Rouge, and so forth. The only savans, known to me, who 

 respected my discoveries, and defended them against envious 

 jlibiistiers^ were Prof. M. Uhlemann in Gottingen, and Prof. H. 

 Wuttke in Leipzig. It is a great loss that the former — the author 

 of many valuable works, the indefatigable vindicator of the truth, 

 who was much better qualified to promote Egyptian philology 

 than all the Champollionists together — died in the bloom of his 

 life. He will allow me to put this triumphant laurel upon his 

 grave- stone. Not less the premature loss of Prof. Wuttke — who 

 repeatedly exposed the public error of supposing that Champol- 

 lion's system is the key to the whole of the Egyptian literature — 

 deserves to be lamented. He has repeatedly chastised literary 

 theft. 



Champollion's erroneous hieroglyphic system is briefly the 

 following : 



1. The Egyptian writing originated from the primitive ideolo- 

 gic literature. 



2. Every hieroglyphic inscription consists half of ideologic 

 characters, explicable to everybody's fancy, and half of pure let- 

 ters and abbreviated words ; e.g., for "onch," s for "suten." 



3. The ideologic figures are either mimetic, or allegoric, or 

 enigmatic. This foolish doctrine originated from misunderstand- 

 ing Clement of Alexandria (Strom, v. 4), where o'JtxSoXcxoz 

 means " syllabic" and not "ideologic," because au/JdSscu and 

 cruiji6dAhcv are synonymous. 



