160 Rev. Epwarp Hincxs on the Number, Names, and Powers 
characters which accompany them would enable the reader to decide. An 
Egyptian, for instance, would at once know that the word represented in fig. 87, 
which occurs Pap. pl. 49, 1. 3, and which signifies “an obelisk,” was to be read 
tekhén, and not rekhén; though we could never have discovered this, if the 
word had not been found written hieroglyphically on an obelisk of Nectanebes. 
But had this been an unusual or foreign word, an Egyptian himself would have 
been at a loss to tell what was its first letter. This difficulty was practically 
removed by the use of expletives. The mouth and semicircle have different 
expletives; and if a word contains one of them followed by its proper expletive, 
it is at once known which of them it is. The object, then, of using expletives 
was, in the first instance, to distinguish letters which were liable to be confounded 
from their similarity. No other pair of characters are so similar as the two last 
mentioned ; but many others closely resemble one another, and the carelessness of 
a scribe, a blot of ink, or a defect in the papyrus, whether existing at the time it 
was written upon, or occurring subsequently, might render it impossible to tell 
which of two or three characters was that intended. The use of expletives was 
then very great, in rendering the reading of words more certain. They, no 
doubt, created an uncertainty, so far as the vowels were concerned ; but in return 
for this they made the consonants much more certain, not only at the time of 
writing, but when what was written should come to be read, perhaps after a con- 
siderable interval of time, and after the papyrus had suffered decay. There are 
many instances in the papyri in the British Museum, in which characters that 
are partly eaten away can be restored with perfect confidence by help of the 
expletives that accompany them; though, if these had been absent, different 
modes of completing them would have been equally proper. 
With respect to the use of expletives in hieroglyphic sculptures, I consider 
it anabuse. The instances of it are comparatively rare, and they occur in texts 
which were copied from hierographic originals. The scribe who drew the cha- 
racters on the stone may have only been acquainted with the art of substituting 
hieroglyphs for the hierographs which corresponded to them. He may not 
have been acquainted with the more difficult art of reducing the hierographic 
originally an ideographic sign of the feminine gender, was used to express D, or, in the south, T, 
the formative of feminine nouns which were derived from masculines, and also the feminine 
article. 
