of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 201 
Joseph’s father in law, and of ox, d0ovn, a kind of cloth, could be ascertained, 
and if both of these were found written with the hand, sufficient weight would 
be attached to this argument to induce me to distinguish the letters, but at pre- 
sent I cannot feel myself justified in doing so. 
With respect to interchanges, I know no instance of a native word being 
written sometimes with the Hand, and sometimes with one of the other charac- 
ters. In the few instances in which this interchange is supposed to have taken 
place, I feel satisfied that distinct words, of different significations, have been con- 
founded. Thus LeT with the bent rope, signifies “ people” (Germ. leute), but 
with the hand “a race,” “to engrave,” &c. It was then probably pronounced 
RoT. This is not a conclusive argument in favour of the diversity of the power 
of the characters, as the same distinction is observed between N 1 and N 2, H1 
and H 2, the phonetic equivalence of which is unquestionable. Still it is not 
calculated to remove the doubts raised by the Hebrew transcriptions; and it 
should be particularly noticed that the purse is, for convenience of grouping, 
frequently interchanged with the bent rope, T 1; but in no pure Egyptian 
word with the hand. Ina foreign word, indeed, it is interchanged ; the 7 of 
5329, which is represented by the purse in fig. 98, from the papyri, being repre- 
sented at Karnac by the hand. The representation of a foreign letter, which 
had no proper equivalent in the language, by two letters not perfectly homo- 
phones, though as similar as © and nm, will not be considered unlikely to have 
occurred. On the other hand, on the tomb of Teta, in the British Museum, 
the name of the principal deceased is written with T1; while that of another 
member of his family is written with the hand. It is not probable that different 
names should be used in the same family so like as NN. and NOD. 
To complete the evidence on both sides I should observe, that a peculiar form 
of the letter A is used before the hand, as in ATN, “form,” “to form,” A'’sx, 
the name of a city, and a few other words; while the eagle is constantly used 
before the other forms of T, as in AT, “the back,” ATP, “to carry,’? &c. This 
is a point which ought not to be overlooked. 
I now leave the question to the judgment of others. My own opinion is, that 
while there is no positive proof that the hand had the value of 0, as distinguished 
from 4, T, which was that of the purse, bent rope, and semicircle, there are 
VOL. xxi © Pate 
