HIEROGLYPHICAL RESEARCHES. 289 



the unknown. He rapidly passed his predecessors. De 

 Sacy had determined three proper names in the Egyp- 

 tian; Akerblad nine others, and five or six Coptic words; 

 while Young, soon after, detected the rudiments of fifty 

 or sixty Coptic words, which, however, formed but a 

 very small fraction of the whole inscription. 



Here an unexpected stumbling-block was en- 

 countered. The effort of Akerblad to reduce the whole 

 Enchorial inscription to Coptic had failed,* and it soon 

 became evident to Young that every such attempt must 

 of necessity fail. His conviction and its grounds are 

 first mentioned in a letter to Mr. Gurney, written in 

 August, 1814. " I doubt," he writes, " if it will be ever 

 possible to reduce much more of it to Coptic, especially 

 as I have fully ascertained that some of the characters 

 are heiroglypliics." As bearing upon the derivative 

 origin of the Enchorial inscription, the discovery here 

 announced is obviously of the highest importance. 

 Young continues : " I have, however, made out the sense 

 of the whole sufficiently for my purpose, and, by means 

 of variations from the Greek, I have been able to effect 

 a comparison with the hieroglyphics which it would have 

 been impossible to do satisfactorily without this inter- 

 mediate step." In a letter to the Archduke John of 

 Austria, dated August 2, 1816, Young announced that 

 he had " now fully demonstrated the heiroglyphical 

 origin " of the Enchorial inscription, f 



* " Notwithstanding this failure, his name," says Peacock, 

 "should ever be held in honour as one of the founders of our 

 knowledge of Egyptian literature, to the investigation of which 

 he brought no small amount of patient labour and philological 

 learning. " 



f " The same discovery," says the editor of the third volume of 

 Young's Works, "was announced by M. Champollion, as his own, 

 in his memoir, De TEcriture Hieratique des Anciens Egypients, 

 published at Grenoble in 1821. . . . This memoir contained sev- 



