of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 165 
as none of them can be older than the seventh age, and as the greater part are 
not earlier than the latter part of the eighth, they cannot be received as evidence 
of primary authority for our present purpose. Some of them, as the names in 
Mr. Grey’s Antigraph and the registries of several deeds, which may, in many 
cases, be resolved into their elements, furnish us with the Greek representatives 
of several hieroglyphic words, as pronounced at Thebes, under the Ptolemies. 
The names of some kings also furnish us with similar data; and the pronuncia- 
tion of them is probably more to be depended on than that of ordinary names, as 
being more generally used by the people in all parts of the country, and, there- 
fore, more likely to be correctly reported. These are chiefly valuable, as they 
may possibly give us the powers of characters which are ascertained by other 
means to correspond to ambiguous Hebrew letters, as the m574)2; and w. 
When we recollect, however, that the Greeks had no mode of correctly 
expressing the sounds of W, V, SH, ZH, CH (at least, when initial), and H 
when not initial, or those corresponding to the Hebrew letters y, wg, and p, all 
of which, for aught that we have a right to assume, may have had representa- 
tives among the Egyptian phonoglyphs, we shall be inclined to lay very little 
stress on Greek transcriptions of hieroglyphic words, as evidence of the powers 
of the letters at any time. All that we can expect from them is a knowledge of 
the vowels that should be inserted among these letters to render the words pro- 
nounceable. The words which I have mentioned above furnish us with some 
evidence on this point, and yet we find them vocalized differently in different 
Greek transcriptions. The name of the god of Thebes is written Apovy, Apev, 
and Awov. We may probably infer from this that the accent was on the first 
syllable, and that the second vowel was pronounced as we should pronounce that 
in the word Ammon. Other instances of discrepancy in the vowels cannot be 
explained in quite so satisfactory a manner; but still the data in question are of 
some use, shewing us, with more or less exactness, how the letters, in many 
words, should be vocalized. As to Greek transcriptions which are not royal 
names, nor of known Theban origin, I would dismiss them from consideration 
altogether. They are possibly—I may say probably—Greek corruptions of 
Egyptian words, which were themselves corruptions of the genuine words that 
they are supposed to represent. I will illustrate this by an example. The name 
