of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 137 
to the quail, U, when followed, as in fig. 10, by the waved line and the sieve, 
has these two letters for its complement; and if they be not expressed after it, 
they must always be supplied. The word is Unkh, corresponding to the Coptic 
witd, “life,” or “to live.’ With respect to the other mode of classifying the 
phonoglyphs, according to their powers, 1 will only observe that Dr. Lepsius 
divided the vowels, which Champollion had thrown into one class, into three 
classes, having the powers of A, I, and U, while he reduced the number of classes 
of consonants from fourteen to twelve. The class of ligatures he rejected as useless, 
the characters contained in it being arranged in the division of peculiar letters. 
In these fifteen classes Dr. Lepsius arranged thirty-four characters, which he sup- 
posed to be the only ones which originally expressed simple sounds, irrespective 
of their connexion. 
During the last year, Chevalier Bunsen has published what he considers to 
be an improvement on Dr. Lepsius’ alphabet. It would be natural to suppose 
that it should be so, as he had the assistance of Dr. Lepsius himself in its con- 
struction, as well as of Professor Schwartze and Mr. Birch. I am, nevertheless, 
disposed to think thatit is little, if at all, superior to Dr. Lepsius’ original alpha- 
bet ; the amendments made in some matters of detail being counterbalanced by 
deteriorations in others, and no improvement being made in the general princi- 
ples on which it is based. The peculiar letters are divided by Chevalier Bunsen 
into two classes, which he calls Syllabic Signs and Mischbilds, or, as we may call 
them, Ideo-phonoglyphs ; but the distinction, at least as he makes it, can scarcely 
be maintained. The battlemented wall (fig. 7) is, according to him, a syllabic 
sign, because it represents the syllable MeN in any word in which it occurs ; 
whereas the crux ansata (fig. 9) is a mischbild, as it is only used in the one 
word and its derivatives, with which it is presumed that it has an ideographic 
relation. It is, however, quite uncertain what connexion existed between the 
crux ansata and life ; and the most probable supposition seems to be that it was 
nothing more than that the Egyptian words representing this object and the idea 
of “ life’? were accidentally sounded alike. We know that this was the case with 
other characters that appear in the Chevalier’s list of mischbilds. The spindle 
with thread (No. 46) is given by him as the mischbild for Hés, “to sing.” 
What possible connexion could there be between a spindle and singing, if we 
looked to the ideas alone? On looking into a Coptic dictionary, however, we 
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