708 



HIEROGLYPHICS 



priests to Germanicus ; but after his time the 

 knowledge of them beyond Egypt itself was ex- 

 ceedingly limited, and does not reappear till the 

 third and subsequent centuries A.D., when they are 

 mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus, who notes 

 the translation of one of the obelisks at Rome by 

 one Hermapion, and by Julius Valerius, the trans- 

 lator into Latin of the apocryphal life of Alexander, 

 who gives that of another. Heliodorus, a novelist 

 who flourished 400 A.D., describes (iv. 8) a hiero- 

 glyphic letter written by Queen Candace. The first 

 positive information on the subject is by Clement 

 of Alexandria (211 A.D. ), who mentions the sym- 

 bolical and phonetic, or, as he calls it, cyriologic 

 nature of hieroglyphics. Porphyry (304 A.D.) 

 divides them also into ccenologic or phonetic 

 and enigmatic or symbolic. Horapollo or Horus- 

 Apollon, who is supposed to have nourished about 

 500 A.D., wrote two books explanatory of the 

 hieroglyphs, a rude, ill-assorted confusion of truth 

 and fiction, in which are given the interpretation 

 of many hieroglyphs and their esoteric meaning. 

 After this writer all knowledge of them disappeared 

 till the revival of letters. At the beginning of the 

 17th century these symbols first attracted atten- 

 tion, and about 1650 Athanasius Kircher, a learned 

 Jesuit, pretended to interpret them by vague 

 esoteric notions derived from his own fancy, on 

 the supposition that the hieroglyphs were ideo- 

 graphic a theory which barred all progress, and 

 which was held in its full extent by the learned, 

 till Zoega in 1787 first enunciated the proposition 

 that the ovals or cartouches contained royal names, 

 and that the hieroglyphs, or some of tnem, were 

 used to express sounds. More monuments were 

 known, and more correct ideas had begun to 

 dawn on the European mind ; and the discovery 

 by the French, in 1799, of the Rosetta Stone, a 

 slab of black basalt, having inscribed upon it, 

 first in hieroglyphics, secondly in demotic or 

 enchorial ( a cursive popular form of writing extant 

 at the period), ana thirdly in Greek, a decree 

 of the priests of Egypt assembled in synod 

 at Memphis, in honour of Ptolemy V., gave 

 the first clue to the decipherment. The first 

 attempts were made upon the demotic text by 

 Silvestre de Sacy with some success, but it was 

 soon discovered that the demotic was not purely 

 alphabetic. Crude notions of the ideographic 

 nature of the hieroglyphs prevailed till Dr Young, 

 in 1818, first gave out the hypothesis that the hiero- 

 glyphs were used as sounds in royal proper names. 

 He was led to this conclusion by tracing the hiero- 

 glyphs through the cursive hieratic to the more cur- 

 sive demotic ; and, as this last was known to be 

 alphabetic, he inferred that the corresponding hiero- 

 glyphic signs were also alphabetic. In this manner 

 He came to the conclusion that the first hieroglyph 



in the name of Ptolemy 



in the 



Rosetta Stone (a door) represented a P, the second 

 (hemisphere) a T; the third (a loop) he supposed 

 to be superfluous ; the fourth (a lion ) he read OLE ; 

 the fifth and sixth, the syllable MI ; and seventh, 

 the back of a seat, an S. Unaided by bilingual 

 monuments, he essayed to decipher the name of 

 Berenice, and altogether established the value of 

 five hieroglyphs as letters out of two names, but 

 was unable to proceed further. Charnpollion ( q. v. ), 

 in 1822, by means of an inscription found on an 

 obelisk at Philse, which had at the base a Greek 

 inscription, recognised the name of Cleopatra, and 

 by comparison with that of Ptolemy, at once 

 proved the purely alphabetic, not syllabico-alpha- 

 betic nature of the signs. Extending the principle, 

 he read by its means the names of the Greek and 

 Roman, and finally those of the native monarchs. 



It was soon seen that the same hieroglyphs as those 

 employed in these names were extensively used in 

 the texts for words, and these words turned out 

 in most instances to be analogous to the Coptic. 

 Although the discoveries of Champollion were 

 received by many of the learned in Europe with 

 distrust, yet his method of research was slowly 

 adopted by Rosellini and Salvolini in 1832, and 

 subsequently extended methodically by Lepsius in 

 1837, and by Bunsen, Hincks, De Rouge, Birch, 

 Goodwin, Chabas, Brugsch, and others. 



'The method of interpretation adopted has been 

 strictly inductive, the value of the characters being 

 deduced from the equation of sounds, or homo- 

 phones of similar groups. The meaning of the 

 groups or words has been determined by examining 

 all known instances in which they occur in pas- 

 sages capable of being interpreted, that of the 

 ideographs by observing the form of the symbols ; 

 many of them have been made out from the pic- 

 tures which they explain, or the phonetic groups 

 which accompany them. A careful comparison has 

 been instituted with corresponding Coptic forms 

 when they exist. In short, a careful principle of 

 induction has been applied to the study of the 

 hieroglyphs. 



The discovery of another trilingual inscription, 

 that of the tablet at San or Tanis, recording a 

 synodical act of the priests in the reign of Ptolemy 

 Euergetes II., 238 B.C., has confirmed the results 

 obtained by Egyptologists, the meaning of almost 

 all the words having been previously determined ; 

 while the power of reading all documents and in- 

 scriptions afforded by their researches has resulted 

 in the resuscitation of a knowledge of the history, 

 science, and literature of the ancient Egyptians. 

 The study has long passed into the category of a 

 recognised branch or oriental learning, and the 

 researches have assumed a more critical form. 

 This has been owing to the number of students 

 and the abundance of the material which exists. 

 The doubts with which the interpretations were at 

 first received have succumbed to the conviction 

 that nothing but a logical system of interpretation 

 could have obtained such results. Whatever doubt, 

 in fact, may exist as to the minor details and 

 more delicate shades of language, all the gram- 

 matical forms and three-fourths of the words of the 

 old Egyptian language have been established. 



The hieroglyplis stood in the same relation 

 to the other two forms of the characters, called 

 hieratic and demotic, as type does to handAvriting. 

 Their use was chiefly for official inscriptions on 

 public or private monuments, religious formula? and 

 prayers, and rituals or Hermetic Books ( q. v. ). The 

 most remarkable hieroglyphic inscriptions are the 

 texts found inscribed upon the pyramids of 

 Pepi, Teta, and Unas ; that of Una, recording 

 the conquest of the lands of the negroes at the 

 time of the 6th dynasty ; that in honour of 

 Khnumhetp at Benihassan, recording the investi- 

 ture of his family with the order of the gold collar ; 

 the campaigns of Ahmes against the Hykshos 

 at El-Kab; the annals of Thothmes III. at 

 Karnak ; the campaign of Rameses II. against 

 the Khita, and the treaty with them ; the account 

 of the tanks for gold- washings in the reigns of 

 Seti I. and Rameses II. at Kouban and Redesich ; 

 the invasion of Egypt in the reign of Meneptah by 

 the allied forces of the Libyans and other people of 

 the basin of the Mediterranean ; the star-risings on 

 the tomb of Rameses V. ; the journey of the ark of 

 Khons to Bakhtan, in the reign of Rameses X. ; the 

 account of Cambyses and Darius on the statue of 

 the Vatican ; the already-cited synodical act of the 

 priests in honour of Ptolemy Euergetes II. ; and 

 that of the priests assembled at Memphis, on the 

 Rosetta Stone, in the reign of Ptolemy V. ; the 



