I9S TRANS. ST. I.OUIS ACAD. SCIENCE. 



System] any whole section of the Book of the Dead, much less a 

 historical papyrus" ; it will bring to light that Champollion'& 

 theory, though sufficient for spelling a very small number of 

 Greek and Roman proper names, was a complete failure so far 

 as translating entire hieroglyphic texts is concerned. Indeed^ 

 since the invention of the Alphabet, I guess, no similar mass of 

 absurdities in spite of common* sense, no greater humbug and 

 deception of the public, has been published within the compass- 

 of a few lines, except those in Kircher's translations of the Obe- 

 lisks, and Brugsch's Egyptian Dictionary of four volumes. 



How came this to pass.^ Poor Goodwin forgot that aufiSohxoi; 

 does not mean "ideologic," but syllabic. Clement of Alexandria 

 distinguishes two classes of hieroglyphs, one being alphabetic 

 {oia zcbv Tzpiozcou axorft'uov)^ the other aufjiSolu-j^ the synonym 

 of a'j)jM6ari, i.e. syllabic, as the context clearly evidences. This 

 is put beyond question by a learned man, Cosmas Indicopleustes, 

 who attests that the hieroglyphs were ypo-nnarcov o'jij.6u)m.. For 

 it would have been nonsense to say that the hieroglyphs ideolo- 

 gically signify letters. An Egyptian hieroglyph could perhaps 

 express a word, a conception, ideologically, but never the mono- 

 gram of a letter ideologically ; that would be a contradictio in 

 adjecto. This -ncorou (peudu^ induced our ChampoUionist ta 

 take half of the signs on the Pompeian slab for ideologic charac- 

 ters, explicable to ever\ body's fancy, whilst the whole of the text 

 does not contain one ideologic hieroglyph. The Tanis stone 

 and the Rosetta confirm that. 



Further, he did not remember that the basis of the Egyptian 

 literature was the primitive alphabet of 25 letters, and that regu- 

 larly each of the 630 hieroglyphs syllabically expressed the con- 

 sonants contained in the name of the figure. 



Moreover, he forgot that several hieroglyphs signified in older 

 times other sounds than Champollion foimd in Greek and Roman 

 proper names, and that the latter had wrongly determined the 

 pronunciation of many hieroglyphic figures. 



, Finally, he ignored that the language subject to the Egyptian 

 literature, commenced 2780 B.C., was not the modern Coptic, 

 spoken from 200 to 600 a.c., but the ancient Coptic, related with 

 the primitive language. The Itpd. dcdhxro:; of the Egyptians 

 was rather a corrupted Hebrew dialect. 



