of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 213 
use in 1 Ki. 18, 26. A little after, in the same inscription, we have the word 
SXeTA, beginning with this letter without an S preceding it; while on the 
tomb of Teta, which is of the same age, it has an S always before the reservoir 
of water. This word is unquestionably a noun. It is by no means inconsistent 
with this view of the power of the letter to suppose that in transcribing foreign 
words it may have been used to represent SH, as it is in won, fig. 23. If the 
Egyptians had no proper sh, they would use skh as the nearest approach to it. 
In fact, Chevalier Bunsen does this very thing; he supposes this character to 
have had the power of sh, but, wishing to represent it by a single character, he 
selects the contraction of o and x. 
Having now gone through the letters which appear in Chevalier Bunsen’s 
alphabet, I proceed to consider the additional letters ; and I will first mention 
those, on the consonantal values of which, as equivalent to those which have been 
already considered, no doubt can exist, but which have been erroneously supposed 
to be syllabic signs, their expletives having been mistaken for complements. 
32. The purse (T 3; t 3) occurs in a great number of transcriptions, being 
in such the most common form of T. Its expletive was the /eaf- Enough has 
been said in the first part of this paper to shew that this was not a complement 
but an expletive. I have not found it in any monument of the first age, nor in 
any which certainly belonged to the second; but I rather think that a stele in 
the British Museum where it is used should be referred to the eleventh dynasty. 
It is dated in the tenth year, the king not being named. It is not later than the 
reign of Osortasen I., and I think it more likely that it should be referred to one 
of his predecessors than to him. 
33. A garden (SX 2; sx 2) is equivalent to No. 31. Compare the transcrip- 
tion of Mooyos, fig. 140, mentioned under No. 25, with that of nw», fig. 136, 
mentioned under No. 13. The two characters are evidently equivalent, and both 
are as evidently alphabetic. The expletive of that now before us is the eagle. 
I do not recollect having met with it in any inscription earlier than the reign of 
Osortasen I., S. E. I. 86; and here it occurs as the name of the first season, and 
is probably an ideograph. As a phonoglyph it was used frequently in the age of 
the papyri, and occasionally in former ages, as in the tomb of Nevotp, at Beni- 
hassan, in the third period. Like the reservoir of water, SX 1, it is occa- 
sionally completed by a prefixed S. 
