of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 193 
objection to the view that I advocate; for the Hebrews could not otherwise 
express a word beginning with a vowel. Besides, according to my view of the 
matter, the /eaf; which is properly x, is necessarily understood before the eagle, 
and also before the letters having the powers of I and U, when not used as Y 
and W. This character does not happen to occur on any of the few monuments 
of the fourth dynasty that have been published ; but, as no word occurs on these 
monuments which was in after times written with this letter (which, when not an 
expletive, is far from being a common one), we are not warranted to infer, as in 
the case of I. 2, U. 2, &c., that it was not yet introduced into the alphabet. Its 
power, probably, ranged between A in father and the same letter in fall. Its 
expletive was the gwaz/, and its name was, consequently, pronounced AW, i. e. 
ow in cow, or perhaps AV. This was, perhaps, the ancient name of this bird, 
though we are not bound to suppose it so; and as the Latin aqua represented the 
ap, av, and aw of cognate languages, so this name may have been etymologically 
connected with agu-ila. Before I dismiss this letter, I think it right to state an 
objection that has occurred to me against the value which I have assigned it, in 
agreement with Chevalier Bunsen, but for which I should have classed it among 
the letters whose values were indisputable. In the word ATP, “to carry or be 
loaded,” of which it is the first letter, it corresponds to a Coptic word, wn, 
beginning with uo, and that it had this value in this word in the Ptolemaic age 
appears from Greek transcriptions, in which this word, when an element in proper 
names, is represented by w-cs, whO-1s, wO-ns, whence it may be argued that 
this was not confined to the vowel A, but might represent any vowel, and must, 
therefore, be equivalent to the /eaf. Surely, however, when the consonants have 
undergone so much corruption in these transcriptions, we may admit that the 
vowels may have been corrupted too. The change from the vowel in ought to 
that in oat is not a very great one, and we know that, in the later ages of the 
Egyptian language, the vowels were much altered. The Thebans, we know, 
used both astg, and uoitg, for the verb “to live ;” and I mentioned, not long 
ago, that erRe, 1&1, and o&e were all used to signify “thirst.” I consider it far 
less improbable that all the words above given were formed by corruption from 
ATP, the vowel pronounced as in /a//, than that, in the many words beginning 
with the leaf, followed by the eag/e and its equivalents, we should be obliged to 
pronounce a double vowel, although I admit that, in many cases, we ought to do 
VOL, XXI. 2B 
