284 TKANS. ST. LOUIS ACAD. SCIENCE. 



Egyptian literature, hpa dcd/.txro;;^ and, since the primitive 

 names of the Noachian letters, preserved even in Greece and 

 Italy, and the words expressed in the original alphabet were 

 Hebrew, it is evident that the Egyptian language, spoken 3,000 

 years prior to modern Coptic, must have been a Hebrew dialect. 

 This is another fundamental error of Ch., by which he and all his 

 successors w^ere prevented from translating Egyptian texts. This 

 second part of the key to the Egyptian literature was discovered 

 in 1826 (Rudimenta Hieroglyphices, Lips. 1826, p. 13), and con- 

 firmed and rectified in all the following researches (Alphabeta 

 genuina, Leips. 1840; Grundsatze d. Mythol., Leips. 1843; Die 

 Phoenix Period, Leips. 1848 ; Gram. ^'Eg., Gotha, 1855 ; Theo- 

 logische Schriften d. a. ^gypter, Leips. 1855, etc.) In the pre- 

 mises, pp. 269-76, 400 Coptic words are reduced to Hebrew 

 roots, and so the half of our Coptic Dictionary will be referred to 

 Hebrew and kindred words. 



VIII. Is it true that Ch. has fixed the pronunciation of the 

 phonetic hieroglyphs, or is it impossible to accomplish this task 

 without previously making out the genuine names of the Egyp- 

 tian hieroglyphs? The following is the way in which Ch. deter- 

 mined the alphabetic pronunciation of 201 hieroglyphs. Having 

 clandestinely appropriated Young's first phonetic hieroglyphs, 

 Ch., by means of them, deciphered a number of Roman and 

 Greek proper names copied by the French savans accompanying 

 Buonaparte in 1799. At the same time Ch. discovered that the 

 phonetic hieroglyphs expressed the consonant or the vowel with 

 which the name of the figure commenced, as is the case with the 

 Hebrew letters. It is to be regretted that the Chts. forgot this 

 rule, in consequence of which Brugsch, Lepsius, and so forth, 

 did not fail wrongly to determine the phonetic values of so many 

 hieroglyphs. Accordingly Ch. imagined that the same hiero- 

 glyphs expressed in older times the same letters which they 

 seemed to express in Roman and Greek proper names ; this was 

 the fountain of gross mistakes. Suppose the name of some hiero- 

 glyphs to have been altered or corrupted in later times, what 

 then? Thus it has turned out that of Ch's 201 phonetic hiero- 

 glyphs 88 were wrongly determined. In order to interpret ancient 

 hieroglyphic texts, it is necessary before all to mark out the aticietit 

 nanus of the 630 elements of the Egyptian literature. See pp. 260-69. 



