1885.] NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 6t 



Plutarch tells us in his book '• Concerning Isis and Osiris " 

 chapter 36, that on the temple of Athene (/. e. the Egyptian 

 Neith) in Sais, there were five hieroglyphic figures : a child, an 

 old man, a hawk, a fish, and a hippopotamus, which he was told 

 meant " Oh ye who come into existence, and ye who pass away, 

 God abominates wickedness," which must have 1)een written 



]^ Ln ^i^ '^^^ m74 or renjju auiu Hor hetu tej), and must 

 be translated : " Ye who are young and ye who are old, God 

 (or Horus) hates iniquity," thus corroborating Plutarch's state- 

 ment. Prof. Dr. Johannes Duemichen of Strassburg, Alsace, 

 the writer's friend and teacher, has done most to farther the 

 study of such diflficult and abstruse texts. 



All that has been said above refers to the first kind of 

 Egyptian writing called Hieroglyphic, which the stone of 



Kosetta renders f°| '"''''^ | (J [ sexi-en-ntiter-zechi, literally: 

 " writing of sacred words." A second division is the Hieratic, 

 which differs from the one just spoken of only in tlie mode of 

 writing, while the words remain wholly unchanged. It is a 

 less defined and more cursive form of Hieroglyphic, and has 

 the advantage of employing only about 500 characters to 

 express all Egyptian words. The Egyptians noticed at an early 

 time that the papyrus with its many fibres would not permit 

 the writing of signs with such precision as on stone, and there- 

 fore they invented this more convenient method of drawing the 

 pictures in outline with a thick pencil, as at present the Arabs 

 and Persians write their ])Ooks with a '•'• Kalam^'' or Latin 

 stylus. The origin of this writing, as far as we are able to de- 

 termine now, can be traced back as far as the fourth dynasty, 

 for in the Pyramid of Gizeh we find the name of Cheops, the 

 Egyptian Chufu (about 3733 B. C), written in a style closely 

 resembling the later Hieratic. This writing of the transition 

 period was retained in copies of the " Book of the Dead," 

 while for secular purposes the continued simplification of the 



