of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 179 
I have already noticed. Mistakes of this sort are very numerous, but so are 
also those which arise from confounding two similar hieroglyphic characters, so 
that it would appear as if this manuscript was immediately copied from a hiero- 
glyphic one, but that the mediate or immediate original of the latter was hiero- 
graphic. As the published edition is, however, not a fac simile, but a copy 
made by the eye, and corrected by Dr. Lepsius, it is probable that some of these 
errors are to be attributed to the European, and not to the Egyptian copyist. 
Indeed it is admitted, at the end of the preface, that some errors in the text are 
of this description, though others are pointed out as being positively in the ori- 
ginal. The mistakes in the text of the Todtenbuch, as published, amount to 
many hundreds; I may say thousands. The principal hieroglyphical manu- 
script in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, is, beyond all comparison, more 
correct; but, no doubt, a still more accurate text could be obtained by a critical 
comparison of a number of MSS. But, considering the worthlessness, in every 
point of view, of the contents of the work, the greater part of which was probably 
composed in the eighth or ninth age, it is scarcely desirable that a critical edition 
of it should extend beyond a few select chapters. 
The other special cause, to which I alluded, of inaccuracy in funeral MSS., is, 
that a MS. intended for a female had often to be taken from an original which 
was written for a male, and wice versd; and such was the gross ignorance of the 
scribes to whom was intrusted the task of writing the many thousand MSS. of 
this kind which were required every year for the market, that great errors were 
thus introduced into the text. The changes which, in general, were required, 
were those of the personal pronouns & and f (fig. 125), which referred to the 
second and third persons masculine singular, into ¢ and s (fig. 124), which 
referred to the same persons feminine. But the scribes sometimes made these 
changes in the letters & and f, when not pronouns, but constituent parts of 
words. Thus, I have seen KaKU1, “ darkness’ (fig. 126), perverted into 
TaTU (fig. 127), and sxafT (fig. 128), a word which seems etymologically con- 
nected with “sheep” and “shape,” whence the Creator or Shaper was repre- 
sented as a sheep, has been corrupted into sxaSsxaS (fig. 129), the blundering 
scribe not only substituting the s for the f£ but writing the first syllable twice 
over, under the impression that the ¢, which was probably written in his original 
instead of ¢, was a mark of duplication, as it sometimes is. It is unnecessary 
Z2 
