732 



HIEROGLYPHICS (EGYPTIAN HISTORY). 



scription in three characters, one of which, in 

 Greek, concluding with these words, was found to 

 contain a decree in honour of Ptolemy Epiphanes ; 

 " Tliis decree shall l>e engraved on a hard stone, in 

 sacred, common, and Greek characters " (It^is */ 



fy^aaitif xcti A.XiKxa;f yaetptfiatit.) The Stone fell 



into the hands of the English after the French troops 

 in Egypt had capitulated, and was deposited in the 

 British museum. The society of antiquaries in Eng- 

 land undertook the investigation of the stone, and 

 caused an engraving of the inscription to be distri- 

 buted to learned individuals and societies in Europe 

 and America. Person (q. v.) and Heyne (q. v.) fur- 

 nished translations of the Greek text, which was 

 rendered very difficult by the mutilation of the stone 

 and other circumstances. The next attempts were 

 directed to the enchorial text. The distinguished 

 Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy, in Paris, detected the 

 words Alexander and Alexandria from their corre- 

 sponding situations in the enchorial and Greek text, 

 his attention being attracted by the repetition of a 

 certain group of equal signs. Mr Akerblad (q. v.) a 

 Swede, constructed an alphabet of the enchorial 

 character, which has not, however, proved correct in 

 all points. Doctor Young next furnished an inter- 

 pretation of the enchorial text by placing it side by 

 side with the Greek text, in which he was guided by 

 the recurrence of the proper names, and employing 

 the alphabet of Akerblad in deciphering it. His first 

 writings were in the eighteenth volume of the Archce- 

 ologia (1815), and in the Museum Criticitm (part vi, 

 1815); but the most important of his productions at 

 this period was the article Egypt, in the Supplement 

 to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. On these papers 

 are grounded the claims of doctor Young, whose 

 merits are undoubtedly great, to the priority in the 

 discovery of the interpretation of hieroglyphical 

 writing, which, we think, can be shown to be without 

 foundation. In 1822 appeared M. Champollion's 

 letter to M. Dacier, in which the phonetic theory is 

 fully displayed. Two years afterwards, Champollion 

 published his Precis du Systeme Hieroglyphique 

 (1824), of which a second edition appeared in 1828. 

 In this work he has perfectly developed his great dis- 

 covery of the phonetic character of the hieroglyphics; 

 he has deciphered the proper names of sovereigns of 

 Egypt from the Roman emperors back through the 

 Ptolemies, to the Pharaohs of the elder dynasties, 

 and detected the hieroglyphical expression of a large 

 number of natural relations, grammatical accidents, 

 and terms of the vocabulary. His labours have 

 already thrown a great deal of light on the early 

 history of Egypt ; the walls of the temples and obe- 

 lisks, and of monuments like the Rosetta stone, are 

 covered with historical inscriptions, and a great num- 

 ber of papyri are in existence, written both in hie- 

 roglyphics and enchorial character ; and M. Cham- 

 pollion has lately returned from the land of mysteries 

 with a great mass of materials for future researches. 

 An impartial examination of doctor Young's article 

 Egypt, we think, will show that he is not the author 

 of this great discovery. In the sec. vii. of the article, 

 entitled " Rudiments of a Hieroglyphical Vocabu- 

 lary," he attempts to analyze and interpret 218 

 characters or groups of characters, in going through 

 which he nowhere distinctly asserts that any of them 

 are phonetic ; and M. Champollion has rejected 141 

 of his explanations as erroneous. After an analysis 

 of the name of Ptolemy, which is altogether erro- 

 neous, he says that this is an instance " of the few 

 proper names, in which some of the steps may be 

 traced, by which alphabetical writing seems to have 

 risen out of the hieroglyphical." His analysis of 

 Berenice, group No. 60, furnishes another specimen 

 of the actual amount of doctor Young's knowledge 



of the alphabetic character of hieroglyphics. Now 

 it may be observed, that he proposes this analysis in 

 two out of more than two hundred groups, without 

 any intimation of there being any thing novel or im- 

 portant in it ; he gives them as specimens of the 

 manner in which, " in a few proper names," traces of 

 a transition from hieroglyphic to alphabetic writing 

 may be found ; many of the characters he reads as 

 syllables ; he proceeds, when possible, by identifying 

 the hieroglyphic figures with the enchorial character, 

 which latter he expressly declares to be not alphabe- 

 tical ; and, finally, at the end of his vocabulary, he 

 says, " the phonetic characters will afford something 

 like a hieroglyphic alphabet, which, however, is 

 merely collected as a specimen of the mode of ex- 

 pressing sounds in some particular cases, and not as 

 having been universally employed, where sounds are 

 required." Champollion's own statement of the dif- 

 ference between his own system and doctor Young's 

 is sufficiently clear on this point. Lastly, we must 

 mention the system of Spohn and Seyffarth, two Ger- 

 man professors. The former is recently dead, and 

 the latter has developed farther the system of the 

 former ; which is chiefly that the Egyptians originally 

 borrowed their alphabet from the Phoenicians (Spohn 

 having discovered some real or apparent resemblance 

 between some demotic letters and Phoenician charac- 

 ters), but that, the Egyptians being fond of variety, 

 they first increased the number of their ordinary 

 characters very amply ; then, from the same love for 

 caligraphy, gave them the forms now found in the 

 hieratic texts ; and, lastly, by way of attaining the 

 acme of caligraphic excellence, arranged all sorts of 

 figures of all sorts of things in something like forms, 

 or assumed them as symbols of their letters, in order 

 to serve as substitutes for them. These are the 

 hieroglyphics ; so that, in this case, against all pro- 

 bability, the human mind would have proceeded from 

 the simple to the complicated, the reverse of what 

 generally and very naturally takes place. This sys- 

 tem, too, assumes the Rosetta stone as its basis. See 

 Rudimenta Hieroglyphices, Leipsic, 1826, a work 

 published from the papers of Spohn by Seyffarth, who 

 is a professor at Leipsic. 



For further information on the subject of hierogly- 

 phics, see Champollion's Precis, his letters to the 

 duke of Blacas d'Auljis, and his letters written from 

 Egypt ; doctor Young's article Egypt, in the Supple- 

 ment to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, his Account of 

 Egyptian Antiquities (London, 1823, &c.); Jablon- 

 ski's Pantheon sEgyptiacum, and the marquis Spineto's 

 Lectures, which, though it contains a few theories 

 perhaps too boldly advanced, yet is a lucid and ex- 

 cellent work. The translation of M. Greppo's work, 

 by Mr Stuart, which we have mentioned already, 

 besides the information on hieroglyphics which it 

 contains, strives to show how important this know- 

 ledge may become for biblical criticism. 



Chronological Periods of Egyptian History which 

 are of great importance tor the subject of this arti- 

 cle. From the histories of Egypt by Manetho, 

 Herodotus, Diodorus, Strabo, Plutarch, and others, 

 and from the discoveries of Champollion, chronolo- 

 gists have been led to divide the history of the 

 Egyptian empire into five periods. They are de- 

 scribed as follows by the marquis Spineto (p. 15, 

 seq.) : " The first begins with the establishment of 

 their government, and comprehends the time during 

 which all religious and political authority was in 

 the hands of the priesthood, who laid the first 

 foundation of the future power of Egypt, founding 

 and embellishing the great city of Thebes, build- 

 ing magnificent temples, and instituting the mys- 

 teries of Isis ; from Misraim to Menes. The 

 second period begins at the abolition of this primitive 



