Rev. Epwarp Hincks on the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 133 
I have said that these three modes of expressing ideas were in use in all ages 
of Egyptian sculpture. Thus, on the front of a tomb in the British Museum, 
which was constructed in the time of the fourth dynasty, we have the ideoglyphs, 
a pyramid (fig. 4), representing “a pyramid ;” a swn’s disk (fig. 5), representing 
by metonymy ‘‘a day,” and also representing Ra, or “the sun,” as an element in a 
royal prenomen; and a great number of others. The name Ptah occurs here 
precisely in the same manner as it does on the Rosetta stone, composed entirely 
of phonoglyphs. And among many words containing characters of both sorts is a 
group consisting of a waved line, a plan of a house, a semicircle, and a sycamore 
tree (fig. 6). The last character is an ideoglyph, and is used as a determinative 
sign after all names of trees, as well as after this; the first two express the» 
sounds of N and H, and may be read Niihe, Nowg,e, the Sahidic name of the 
sycamore tree. ‘The semicircle is sometimes, and is probably here, a sign of the 
feminine gender ; but it also denotes the letter T, which was a feminine termi- 
nation, and the word may, perhaps, have been sounded Niihet. 
In the first work of Champollion, his essay De Ecriture hiératique des 
anciens Hgyptiens, published in 1821, he recognized the existence of only the 
first of these three ways of representing words, supposing that all the Egyptian 
characters represented ideas. When he discovered the erroneousness of this 
opinion, he used all possible efforts to suppress the work in which he had stated 
it. That work, however, contained a valuable discovery. In it he announced 
the great principle that hieratic characters, as they have been called, were exact 
transcripts of hieroglyphics, having the same relation to them as the cursive 
characters which we use in writing on paper bear to the capitals of our lapidary 
inscriptions. ‘To mark out this correspondence between the two kinds of writing, 
it may be well to substitute the name Hierographic for Hieratic ; and we may, in 
like manner, give the names of Ideographs and Phonographs to the two classes of 
the written characters. By the discovery of this principle, the way was opened 
for using the papyri which contain hierographic texts, in conjunction with the 
proper hieroglyphics, as means of attaining the knowledge of the common lan- 
guage and manner of writing. It is to the joint study of hieroglyphic and 
hierographic texts that I owe the discoveries which I am now about to an- 
nounce. 
In the year after this publication, Champollion published his Leétre a M. 
