ORIENTAL ARCHEOLOGY 



that it gave promise, even when casually inspected, 

 of furnishing a key to the centuries -old mystery of 

 the hieroglyphics. For two thousand years the secret 

 of these strange markings had been forgotten. No- 

 where in the world quite as little in Egypt as else- 

 where had any man the slightest clew to their mean- 

 ing ; there were those who even doubted whether these 

 droll picturings really had any specific meaning, ques- 

 tioning whether they were not rather vague symbols 

 of esoteric religious import and nothing more. And 

 it was the Rosetta Stone that gave the answer to these 

 doubters and restored to the world a lost language 

 and a forgotten literature. 



The trustees of the museum recognized at once that 

 the problem of the Rosetta Stone was one on which the 

 scientists of the world might well exhaust their in- 

 genuity, and promptly published to the world a care- 

 fully lithographed copy of the entire inscription, so 

 that foreign scholarship had equal opportunity with 

 the British to try at the riddle. It was an English- 

 man, however, who first gained a clew to the solu- 

 tion. This was none other than the extraordinary Dr. 

 Thomas Young, the demonstrator of the vibratory 

 nature of light. 



Young's specific discoveries were these: (i) That 

 many of the pictures of the hieroglyphics stand for the 

 names of the objects actually delineated; (2) that other 

 pictures are sometimes only symbolic; (3) that plural 

 numbers are represented by repetition; (4) that nu- 

 merals are represented by dashes ; (5) that hieroglyphics 

 may read either from the right or from the left, but 

 always from the direction in which the animal and 



289 



