EGYPTIAN SCIENCE 



to-day's vision extends with tolerable clearness to 

 about the middle of the fifth millennium B.C. This 

 change has been brought about chiefly through study 

 of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. These hieroglyphics 

 constitute, as we now know, a highly developed system 

 of writing ; a system that was practised for some thou- 

 sands of years, but which fell utterly into disuse in 

 the later Roman period, and the knowledge of which 

 passed absolutely from the mind of man. For about 

 two thousand years no one was able to read, with any 

 degree of explicitness, a single character of this strange 

 script, and the idea became prevalent that it did not 

 constitute a real system of writing, but only a more or 

 less barbaric system of religious symbolism. The fal- 

 sity of this view was shown early in the nineteenth 

 century when Dr. Thomas Young was led, through 

 study of the famous trilingual inscription of the 

 Rosetta stone, to make the first successful attempt 

 at clearing up the mysteries of the hieroglyphics. 



This is not the place to tell the story of his fascinat- 

 ing discoveries and those of his successors. That story 

 belongs to nineteenth-century science, not to the science 

 of the Egyptians. Suffice it here that Young gained 

 the first clew to a few of the phonetic values of the 

 Egyptian symbols, and that the work of discovery 

 was carried on and vastly extended by the Frenchman 

 Champollion, a little later, with the result that the firm 

 foundations of the modern science of Egyptology were 

 laid. Subsequently such students' as Rosellini the 

 Italian, Lepsius the German, and Wilkinson the Eng- 

 lishman, entered the field, which in due course was cul- 

 tivated by De Rouge" in France and Birch in England, 



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