150 Rey. Epwarp Hincxs on the Number, Names, and Powers 
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an instance of two letters being written without expletives, to be compared with 
another form of the word (fig. 39) occurring Pl. 113, 1. 7, where all the letters 
have expletives. If this last form be read according to the received manner, 
it will be Ruw-w-i-ha, with four syllables in place of two. Can any one imagine 
that this was the true pronunciation, and that the forms (figs. 36 and 37) were 
abridgments of the word, produced by the omission of its proper vowels, which 
ought to be supplied ? 
The other instance is the word for “moon.” It occurs at Karnac as in 
fig. 38 (Champ. Gr. p. 198), with three letters, dah, and, as a determinative 
sign, the /unar crescent. The Sahidic equivalent of this word is 009, ooh ; 
and the pronunciation is represented in Greek by the first syllable of the proper 
name ”Apuaors, which was probably sounded as a in call. The Greeks, having 
no mode of representing the breathings in the middle of words, may have 
reduced two syllables to one; but if the word, as it appears in fig. 38, was 
written defectively—if it properly contained another long vowel, how would 
such a contraction have been possible? Yet the word is written in the papyrus, 
Pl. 8, 1. 11, as in fig. 40, with a quail at the end. If the letters be all sounded 
in the order in which they occur, this would be A-a-hu ; if we admit that trans- 
position of the final vowel, which I suppose I must consider as the received mode 
of reading hieroglyphics, it would be A-a-wh or A-u-ah. All these forms are 
decidedly inconsistent with both the Sahidic word, and the Greek representative 
of the old Egyptian one. 
Without multiplying examples, I think I may now consider it as proved, that, 
in the age of the papyri, the Egyptians used expletive characters after the letters 
of native words, as well as of foreign ones. I proceed to shew that the practice 
was not peculiar to this age, but prevailed under the twelfth dynasty, and even 
before it. My argument is this. I bring forward instances in which the same 
word is written with and without letters which were used in the age of the 
papyri, as the proper expletives of the letters which precede them, and which, 
according to the principle already established, should be considered as expletives 
in texts of that age. I then infer, by a fair analogy, that if the longer forms of 
these words were to be reduced to the shorter forms in the age of the papyri, 
they should be so also in other ages, where the same diversity of form existed. 
The first instances which I adduce are from two steles in the British Museum, 
