of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 167 
as Apa, Is. xxxvii. 9, and which our translators have expressed by Tirhakah, 
was probably Tharaka, conformable to the transcription of the LXX., Gapaxa. 
The initial letter could not have been sounded as T, if it was expressed, as it 
apparently is, by a combination of T and H; nor should either of the two Ha’s 
be sounded, they being both representatives of the long A. The Masoretes 
have rightly pointed the latter as such, but our translators have expressed it in 
opposition to them, while they have also adopted their error in pointing the first 
He asa consonant. It is possible, indeed, that the true reading of the name was 
Tal’raka, the H being united with the R instead of with the T; but the ana- 
logy of Phrat (fig. 15) leads me to prefer the former reading. 
In Ez. xxx. 87, another Egyptian name occurs, np27y. Our translators 
(who neglected the change of sound of the Beth, indicated by the presence or 
absence of Dagesh) read this name P%-beseth, but the Theban pronunciation 
was probably Pi-Bast, and the Memphitic Fi-Bast, or perhaps Basth. The 
initial letter of the name of the goddess (fig. 89) was certainly B, and not V, 
as the absence of the dagesh would indicate. It is expressed by a combination 
of characters, which, taken singly, represented at Thebes W and P, and which 
were repeatedly used, as we shall see in the sequel, to represent B. The seat 
has here the power of S. The semicircle is T, and the lituus, its expletive. 
seems here inserted in order to shew that this was to be sounded in this instance 
as a letter, and was not a mere sign of the feminine gender. This is followed 
by the determinative sign for Egypt, already met with in fig. 78. The initial 
character is an ideoglyph ; it is to be sounded, as the small line indicates, as the 
name of a house, the article being prefixed ; and as that line marks it to be of 
the masculine gender, the article will be 5, sounded as with dagesh at Thebes, 
and without it at Memphis. The same element occurs in the name of pn‘5, 
“the house of Tom, Heroopolis,” and of PiAaz for Pi-Aak, probably “the house 
of the beginning.” ‘This word, when it signifies, as here, “a town” (as the cor- 
responding Hebrew Beth often does), was masculine ; otherwise it was feminine. 
The Coptic equivalent was HI, pronounced, I believe, yi; but the old Egyptian 
word may have been ?, as the transcription didae would indicate. The goddess 
Bast, after whom this city was named, is frequently mentioned in the Memphitic 
papyrus, Sallier, No. [V.; at Thebes she seems not to have been worshipped. 
Champollion and his followers have confounded her with the lion-headed goddess 
