62 - TRANSACTIONS OF THE [afRIL 13, 



ed the unbounded praise of all nations, has increased our 

 knowledge of history, has furnished weapons against the ad- 

 verse criticism of the Bible, and has insured to the study of 

 Egyptian a permanent place in the leading universities of the 

 world. He lived to see the time that the Stone of Tanis (other- 

 wise called the Decree of Canopus), discovered hj himself, 

 proved beyond the shadow of a doubt the truth of his teach- 

 ings and of his whole system of interpretation. Since then 

 every voice of opposition has been silenced. As can readily be 

 inferred, he has not done all this work by himself, but had a 

 host of willing laborers, whose names form around him a halo 

 of surpassing lustre. Suffice it to recall such names asBrugsch, 

 Ebers, Duemichen, men licfore whom science Vjows in homage, 

 or such as Birch (England), Pleyte (Holland), Rouge, Cliabas 

 and Maspero (France). A host of admirers of Egyptology is 

 pressing on in the wake of these scholars, and adds fame to the 

 laurels already gained by them. " Progress " is the watch- 

 word of Egyptology, nor need we be surprised at this, as we 

 must bear in mind that thousands of monuments still remain 

 buried away under the sand of the desert and the soil of the 

 Nile-valley and that each addition to the discovered inscriptions 

 helps to fill up some little gap that appears in various parts of 

 this young study. 



The language of the ancient Egyptians, spoken for certainly 

 more than 4,000 years, till it ceased about two centuries ago, 

 was an intermediate form between the Shemitic and Hamitic 

 languages, and was in use from the Mediterranean Sea to the 

 land of Ethiopia or Nubia. It was written at lirst not liy 

 conventional signs or letters, but by actual pictures of visible 

 objects, called hieroglyphs ( i. e. sacred carvings). This method 

 of writing a language leads us to believe Egyptian to be the 

 oldest of all written languages. As in the case of our al)origi- 

 nals here, we would expect the first l)eginnings of a written 

 language to be a disconnected enumeration of ideographs with- 

 out any phonetic values affixed to them. This is, however, not 



