138 Rev. Epwarp Hinoxs on the Number, Names, and Powers 
find that the one word (9,wc) represented both ideas. Hence, the character, which 
ideographically represented the word in one sense, was used to represent it also 
in the other. The case is the same with the lute (No. 32), which represents 
the word never, “ good,” because the name of this musical instrument was, in 
the old Egyptian language, nevel, corresponding to the Hebrew 53), and the 
Greek vaBAa, the letters L and R being confounded. It appears from this, 
that the distinction between the mischbilds and the syllabic signs is a very uncer- 
tain one. To draw a correct line between the two would require a more com- 
plete knowledge of the language than we now possess, or, indeed, I may say, 
than we are likely to possess; and if it could be drawn, it would be of little or 
no practical benefit. I will, accordimgly, make no attempt to draw it, but will 
revert to the original arrangement of Dr. Lepsius, classing the phonoglyphs 
which are not used as letters under the letters which are first sounded in the 
words or syllables that they represent, and making no other distinction between 
them than what depends on the various manners in which they are connected 
with the letters that sometimes accompany them. 
Chevalier Bunsen has also made a distinction between the alphabetic characters 
which were used in his so-called old kingdom, and those which were introduced 
subsequently. He supposes the former to have been in number twenty-five, which 
is stated by Plutarch to have been the number of letters in the old Egyptian alpha- 
bet; and he says that seven were added in the new kingdom. Thus he makes 
the total number of purely alphabetical characters less by two than Dr. Lepsius 
had made it, who, as I shall shew in this paper, reduced it considerably below the 
truth. The distinction here made is as little to be depended on as the foregoing 
one. Of the seven characters which he rejects from the alphabet of the old 
kingdom, four at least will be shewn, in the course of this essay, to have been in 
use as letters under the twelfth dynasty; while one is admitted by himself to 
have been never used as a letter till the Ptolemaic period. It is certainly a 
matter of interest to ascertain when each character was first used; and this I will 
endeavour to do, subject, of course, to correction from future observations ; but 
I consider the notion that the monuments of the eighteenth dynasty exhibit an 
alphabet materially different from those of the latter part of the twelfth, to be 
unfounded in fact. 
The causes of the want of success, which I attribute to Dr. Lepsius and his 
