204 TRANS. ST. LOUIS ACAD. SCIPZXCK. 



c^-V (hpt), the Creator, and was hieroglyphically expressed by 

 the letters hpt. To the same class refer Don (chatam) instead of 

 T6)j«., TOJT instead of nON (atad) firmare, ujex for n^'y (agad) cre- 

 dere, TVoT-A. for h^v. (halal), etc. 



Further, a great many Coptic words lost a middle radical let- 

 ter, e.g. ^HT, ancient ^^npr, like xapo'ta, corda, Dan. hierta, Sax. 

 herda, Eng. heart. Germ. Hertz, etc. ; xevi instead of run, cq 

 N2D (saba, bibere), Germ, saufe-n, o-noi instead of 9e<noTi = uTrra- 

 fxac. In general, all Coptic words containing two consecutive 

 vowels lost one intervening radical consonant. 



Finally, a number of Coptic words were, in the course of time, 

 deprived of their final radical, e.g. k^^ja. instead of 5<dJ (gama), 

 Kis,Ti for S3n (chaba), a&.e for Ses.T, cht, cauda, finis, and so on. 



After these necessary preambles we proceed to the grammati- 

 cal interpretation of the Pompeian stele. This being impossible 

 without ascertaining the pronunciation of the respective hiero- 

 glyphic figures as exactly as possible, we must recur to many 

 other, particularly bilingual inscriptions, which, for the sake of 

 brevity, may be designated by the following abbreviations : 



T. S. signifies the trilingual Tanis Stone. 



R. S. " the trilingual Rosetta Stone. 



H. O. " Hermapion''s bilingual Obelisk. 



T. B. " the so-called Todten-Buch. 



G. ^E. " the author's Grammatica ^rEgyptiaca, Lips. 1855. 



R. H. " the author's Rudimenta Hieroglyphica, Lips. 1826. 



St. L. T. " The Transactions of the Acad, of Science of St. Louis, Mo. 



Ch. " Champollion and the Champollionists. 



G. " Goodwin. L. signifies Lepsius. B. signifies Brugsch Bey. 



GRAMIWATICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE POMPEIAN TABLET. 



NOTA. — In the following disquisition we shall very often recur to the extensive Turin 

 copy of the sacred records of the ancient Egyptians (Lepsius's Todtenbuch), and it is a 

 meritorious work that J. Lieblein published, " Index Alphabetique de tous les mots con- 

 tenues dans ie Livre des Morts, Paris, 1875." ^t is to be regretted only that he repeated 

 the hieroglyphs wrongly represented by Lepsius ; that he again transposed the figures ; 

 that he enumerated the latter according not to their natural order, but to u preposterous sys- 

 tem, and that he misjoined diflerent roots in numberless instances. 



A. The Pictorial Line on tlie appended Plates. 



a. This figure is, according to the great Champollionist 

 Brugsch Bey, tlie " invention of an Egyptian king who sought 

 to terrify his subjects by horrible images of the deities, composed 



