288 THOMAS YOUNGK 



the first, Hieroglypbical or sacred; the second, En- 

 chorial l a name given by Young to the common lan- 

 guage employed by the Egyptians in the time of the 

 Ptolemies ; and the third, Greek. At the end are given 

 the following directions : ' What is here decreed shall 

 be engraved on a block of hard stone, in sacred, in 

 native, and in Greek characters, and placed in each 

 temple of the first and second and third gods.' All 

 three inscriptions were more or less mutilated and 

 effaced when the stone was discovered. Person and 

 Heyne had, however, succeeded in almost completely 

 restoring the Greek one. It had been a custom with 

 Young to pay an annual visit to Worthing, and to 

 pursue there for a portion of the year his practice as 

 a physician. The Society of Antiquaries had caused 

 copies of the three inscriptions of the Eosetta stone to 

 be made and published. In the summer of 1814 

 Young took all of them to Worthing, where he sub- 

 jected them to a severe comparative examination. 



Baron Sylvestre de Sacy, an eminent Orientalist, 

 had discovered in the native Egyptian certain groups 

 of characters answering to proper names, while Aker- 

 blad, a profound Coptic scholar, had not only added to 

 the number, but attempted to establish an alphabet 

 answering to the native Egyptian inscription. Young 

 took up the researches of these distinguished men as 

 far as they could be relied on. Assuming all three in- 

 scriptions to express the same decree, one of them being 

 in a language known to scholars, it was inferred by 

 Young that a strict comparison of line with line, word 

 with word, and character with character, would lead 

 him by the sure method of science from the known to 



1 Called in the Greek ENCHOKIA GRAMMATA,' or letters of the 

 country. Young deprecates the introduction, afterwards, by Cham-, 

 pollion, of the term * DEMOTIC,' or popular. 



