of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 147 
in place of these they sometimes take the letters implied. Thus, the waved line, 
N, has for its expletive three small bars, the usual sign of the plural number. 
This implies that the waved line should be read three times, by which the hiero 
glyphic sign of water, as in fig. 14, is formed. The name of this latter is, then, 
the name of “water.” But instead of expressing the name in this circuitous 
manner, the eagle is sometimes added to the waved line as its expletive, thus con- 
stituting the word Na, which was the old Egyptian name of “water.” Thus, 
the waved line is used with two expletives—the eagle, which expresses the vowel 
A, and the three small bars, which imply the same vowel. With these two 
exceptions, which are rather apparent than real ones, the uniformity of the exple- 
tive letters is an essential part of the principle which I seek to establish. 
It will, I should hope, be now admitted, that, in writing foreign words, the 
Egyptians of the age of the papyri often spelled them, as we may express it. 
Instead of writing the letters which composed them, they wrote the names of 
those letters, just as if, in place of writing the name Rome, we were to write 
Ar-o-em-e. I come now to shew that, in writing words of their own language, they 
occasionally adopted the same expedient, whatever its object may have been. 
It might at first be thought that the simplest mode of proving this would 
be to bring forward a number of instances in which the same word was written 
with and without expletive vowels; but a little consideration will shew that for 
our present purpose this will not be enough. It is the course which I mean to 
take, when, having proved that expletive letters were inserted in words during 
the age of the papyri, I proceed to shew that the same practice prevailed under 
the twelfth dynasty, and previous thereto. If, however, I were to rest my case 
on this simple fact, in the present instance, I should be met with the reply, that 
these vowels were the proper vowels of the words; and that, in place of regard- 
ing them as expletive when used, we should supply them when not used. If I 
should object to this reply, that there were vowels at the end of words which, if 
we may at all depend on their Coptic representatives, must have terminated with 
consonants, it would be rejoined, that these vowels, though written at the end 
of words, should be read in the middle of them, or even at the beginning, accord- 
ing to a supposed law of “transposition of vowels,” of which Champollion gave 
two instances, and which his followers have since applied to many other words. 
In order to meet objections of this sort, it will be necessary to bring forward 
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