UNION OF CLASSICAL WITH SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. 73 



from the invaluable inscriptions in honour of Ptolemy Epi- 

 phanes ; which contain the only authentic specimen in exist- 

 ence of hieroglyphical characters expressly accompanied by a 

 translation. 



" The block or pillar of black basalt, found by the French 

 in digging up some ground at Rosetta, and now placed in the 

 British Museum, exhibits the remains of three distinct in- 

 scriptions ; and the last, which is in Greek, ends with the in- 

 formation, that the decree, which it contains, was ordered to 

 be engraved in three different characters, the sacred letters, 

 the letters of the country, and the Greek. Unfortunately a 

 considerable part of the first inscription is wanting : the be- 

 ginning of the second, and the end of the third, are also muti- 

 lated ; so that we have no precise points of coincidence from 

 which we can set out, in our attempts to decipher the unknown 

 characters. The second inscription, which it will be safest to 

 distinguish by the Greek name enchorial, signifying merely the 

 characters ' of the country,' notwithstanding its deficiencies 

 near the beginning, is still sufficiently perfect to allow us to 

 compare its different parts with each other, and with the 

 Greek, by the same method that we should employ if it were 

 entire. Thus, if we examine the parts corresponding, in their 

 relative situations, to two passages of the Greek inscription 

 in which Alexander and Alexandria occur, we soon recognize 

 two well-marked groups of characters resembling each other, 

 which we may therefore consider as representing these names; 

 a remark which was first made by M. De Sacy, in his letter 

 relating to this inscription. A small group of characters, oc- 

 curring very often in almost every line, might be either some 

 termination, or some very common particle : it must there- 

 fore be reserved till it is found in some decisive situation, 

 after some other words have been identified, and it will then 

 easily be shown to mean and. The next remarkable collec- 

 tion of characters is repeated twenty-nine or thirty times in 

 the enchorial inscription ; and we find nothing that occurs so 

 often in the Greek, except the word king, with its compounds, 

 which is found about thirty-seven times. A fourth assemblage 

 of characters is found fourteen times in the enchorial inscrip- 

 tion, agreeing sufficiently well in frequency with the name of 

 Ptolemy, which occurs eleven times in the Greek, and gene- 

 rally in passages corresponding to those of the enchorial text 

 in their relative situation : and, by a similar comparison, the 

 name of Egypt is identified, although it occurs much more fre- 

 quently in the enchorial inscription than in the Greek, which 

 often substitutes for it country only, or omits it entirely. Hav- 

 ing thus obtained a sufficient number of common points of 



