Hieroglyphical Fragments. 317 



Precisely in the same spirit he remarks, in the next page, that 

 Barthelemy and Zoega had pointed out the rings a contain- 

 ing proper names : they had, indeed, said that they might be 

 proper names, or moral sentences, or something else ; but the 

 only question was, if it was worth questioning at all, to whom 

 belonged the priority of the demonstration that they actually 

 were proper names : which, before the publication of the 

 Archaeologia for 1814, was no where to be found. This pub- 

 lication was the first great step after the discovery of the pillar 

 of Rosetta : the second was the identification of the different 

 kinds of characters, in 1816, by means of the Description de 

 1'Egypte : the third, the application of that identification to the 

 names of Ptolemy and Berenice : the fourth, perhaps, was 

 Mr. Bankes's discovery in Egypt, of the name of Cleopatra, 

 which he sent to Paris : and on these grounds are certainly 

 founded ALL that is at present known of Egyptian literature, 

 for a very considerable proportion of which we are unquestion- 

 ably indebted to Mr. Champollion. 



# * % * 



The French translator of Mr. Browne's ingenious articles 

 which appeared in the Edinburgh Review, has certainly gone 

 a good deal out of his way to find matter of accusation against 

 Mr. Champollion. He quotes the text of a memoir published 

 in 1821, and afterwards suppressed, in order to show that 

 Mr. Champollion then continued to believe that the hiero- 

 glyphics were signs of things and not of sounds; and that he 

 disagreed with those learned persons who had considered the 

 hieratic writing as alphabetical. The date of this suppressed 

 paper is indeed of some consequence, as determining the 

 period at which Mr. Champollion made his rediscovery of 

 what Dr. Young had published in 1816 ; that is, the fact of 

 the essential identity of the two systems of writing. But the 

 translator might have found in the beginning of the letter to 

 Mr. Dacier, dated in 1822, the same opinion respecting these 

 systems of writing ; that is, the hieratic and demotic, which, 

 he says, are not alphabetic, but " ideographic, like the hiero- 

 plyphics themselves," expressing ideas and not sounds : and he 

 adds, that he ( ! ) has deduced from the demotic inscription of 

 Rosetta a series of characters which have a " syllabico-alpha- 



OCT. DEC. 1827. Y 



