of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 18] 
totally different consideration. Again, in Pl. 136, 1. 7, we have the word repre- 
sented in fig. 131; while, in the corresponding place of the other MS., Pl. 22, 
|. 3, we have the two characters in fig. 132. In this instance, as in the former, 
while there is no resemblance between the characters substituted and those which 
they replaced, there is a resemblance between the sounds which they expressed ; 
MeRi, “loving,” and M-IRI, “in the eye,” must have been pronounced nearly 
alike. 
I now come to the fourth class of data,—comparisons of Egyptian words, 
expressed by phonetic characters, with corresponding words in kindred lan- 
guages. The language on which most reliance has been heretofore placed is the 
Coptic, which is a descendant from the old Egyptian language of the age of the 
papyri, though in aremote degree. It appears, however, that, from the influx of 
foreign words, and the change of ideas attendant on the conversion of the people 
to Christianity, much of it has been lost ; and much of the remainder was so greatly 
changed in the thirteen or fourteen centuries which elapsed between the writing 
of the papyri and the introduction of the Coptic alphabet in place of the hiero- 
glyphic characters, that very little reliance can be placed on the Coptic equiva- 
lents of the old words for determining the true powers of the letters which com- 
posed the latter. Not to speak of the vowels, which are written in Coptic words 
with little or no regard to any rule, many of the consonants in the old language 
have two or more different Coptic letters which occasionally represent them ; 
while many Coptic letters are found to correspond to several hieroglyphic cha- 
racters, which it is difficult to suppose were all equivalent. The seve and its 
homophones are, as already observed, generally represented by gw, equivalent to 
our SH; but they are also represented by g,, that is, our H, and in the Mem- 
phitic dialect by J, supposed to correspond to the Hebrew n. That this last 
was the true power of the sieve appears not only from the consideration of the 
above three representations, the last of them being the only one from which the 
others would be likely to be derived, but also from the transcriptions of Egyp- 
tian words in Hebrew characters, and of Hebrew or Pheenician words in Egyptian 
characters. But, this being admitted, a question arises,—in all the Egyptian 
words, in the Coptic equivalents of which the gg occurs, are the phonoglyphs 
which correspond to this letter equivalent to the sieve? To say nothing of 
words in which it appears to correspond to characters which are supposed to have 
