of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 171 
to this I answer, that the greater part of the words transcribed, of which we have 
any equivalents, are met with in the older books of the Hebrew Scriptures; and 
that the interval between the writing of these and the age of the papyri was not 
great. I answer, further, that the population of Syria, including the Holy Land, 
of the names of places in which many of these names are transcriptions, has 
always been peculiarly tenacious of old names. It is notorious that many towns 
and villages have the same names now as they had in the time of Joshua; and 
they must have had the same at the intermediate time when the transcriptions 
were made. But, it should be observed, I am not advocating the adoption of a 
hasty conclusion from scanty evidence. In order to ascertain the power of each 
phonoglyph, a variety of words in which it occurs should be examined; its dif- 
ferent equivalents, if such it have, should be considered, and a judgment formed 
as to which is most probable, both from the number of times that it appears to 
represent it, and from its capability of accounting in a satisfactory manner for the 
other representations of it. If there be any reasonable cause for doubt, other 
kinds of data should be, if possible, appealed to. It is not only the possible 
change of value of a foreign letter that may lead to mistake, and that must be, 
therefore, guarded against: we must recollect also that foreign letters may have 
had no phonoglyphs exactly representing them, and may, therefore, of necessity, 
have had to be represented either by a combination of phonoglyphs, or by such 
as expressed approximate sounds. Examples of the first method have been given 
m the names of the river Frat (fig. 15), of King Tharaka (fig. 88), and of the 
city of Pi-bast (fig. 89). As an example of the latter I give the word 513, 
“a castle,” transcribed as in fig. 98, Pl. 114, 1. 2. It will clearly appear here- 
after that the letters which represent ) and 7, in this word, had properly the 
force of K and T; and this is, to say the least, strong presumptive evidence that, 
in the age of the papyri at Thebes, no phonoglyphs had the powers of G and D. 
In this figure, and in those which follow it, the expletive characters are distin- 
guished by drawing them with broken outlines. The two last characters in the 
word, the conventional representations of a wa// and a house, are determinative 
signs. 
The foreign words, of which transcriptions are found in the papyri, are, first, 
Hebrew words, not being names of places, among which I include the names of 
two false deities worshipped within the limits of Canaan ; secondly, proper 
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