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VL—An Attempt to ascertain the Number, Names, and Powers, of the Letters 
of the Hieroglyphic, or ancient Egyptian Alphabet ; grounded on the 
Establishment of a new Principle in the Use of Phonetic Characters. By 
the Rev. Epwarp Hincxs, D.D. 
Read 26th January, 9th February, and 8th June, 1846. 
INTRODUCTION. 
I BELIEVE that very few persons can be found, that have studied the subject 
of Egyptian writing themselves, or that place a reasonable degree of confidence 
in those who have, who do not now admit that the Egyptians of all ages, from 
which any monuments remain to us, represented their ideas to the eye in three 
ways :—partly by characters, which, singly or in combination, immediately repre- 
sented them; partly by characters which expressed the words by which they 
were represented to the ear; and partly by combinations of both sorts of charac- 
ters. Thus, in the last line of the Rosetta stone, we have a collection of writing 
materials (fig. 1), expressing the word ypappaow of the Greek text which 
corresponds to it, and which would probably be pronounced Skhi ; we have a 
square mat, a semicircle, and a twisted rope (fig. 2), expressing in combination 
the name of a god, which, in the fourth line of the Greek text, is written ®a, 
and in a Sahidic manuscript 1T&9,, i. e. Ptah ; and again, we have a chair-back, 
a sort of flowering water-plant, and a pair of leaves, with an object which 
Champollion supposed to be a pen-knife (fig. 3), representing the same word, 
Skhi, as fig. 1 does. The three first characters represent the three phonetic ele- 
ments of this word ; and the fourth indicates that it expresses some idea connected 
with writing. A character like the last was called by Champollion a Determina- 
tive Sign. Chevalier Bunsen calls it a Deutbild. We may give to these cha- 
racters, and also to those which, like the collection of writing materials, represent 
ideas without the intervention of words, the common name of Ideoglyphs ; the 
other characters in these figures being called Phonoglyphs. 
