98 FICTtTRE-WPJTING AND WOED-WRITING. 



a horse for " horse/' a brancli for " wood/' etc., upon tlie same 

 principle as in any savage picture-writing. The other part of the 

 figures are phonetic. Thus the figure of a strap, the name of 

 which is 171-5, becomes a phonetic sign to write the sound Wj-s 

 with. (The - stands for some vowel, which is represented by 

 ou in the Coptic form of the word, mous.) Again, there are 

 many characters which Champollion held to be pure conso- 

 nants, 2^ ">'} ^^^ so forth. They are certainly so in the spelling 

 of Ptolemy and Cleopati-a, Tibe*ius and Hadrian, and such fo- 

 reign names, and even in writing pure Egyptian words at a 

 much earlier date, where they come at the ends of words, as 

 where the mouth, ro or ru, ends the word liar (under, with), 

 being there nothing but the letter r. Modern Egyptologists, 

 however, hold Champollion to have gone too far in reducing 

 phonetic characters to mere letters ; for instance, Mr. Birch 

 reads as A-a and pu the Ti— and p- sounds which Champollion 

 set down as mere letters li and f in bis alphabet. For prac- 

 tical purposes in interpreting Egyptian inscriptions, the dis- 

 tinction is of very lit;tle consequence, for vowels are very hazy 

 things in the ancient Egyptian, as in its successor the Coptic, 

 and it may be allowable to go on wi'iting Egyptian words 

 whose vowels are indefinite, as though they had none at all. 

 But the syllabic theory (it is not a new view, for Dr. Young 

 held it before Champollion went away from it) is of great in- 

 terest in the history of writing, as giving the whole course of 

 development, by which a picture, of a mouth for instance, 

 meant first simply mouth, then the name of mouth ro, and 

 lastly dropped its vowel and became the letter r. Of these 

 three steps, the Mexicans made the first two. 



In Egyptian hieroglyphics, special figures are not always set 

 apart for phonetic use. At least, a nu.mber of signs are used 

 sometimes as letters, and sometimes as pictures, in which 

 latter case they are often marked with a stroke. Thus the 

 mouth, with a stroke to it, is usually (though not always) 

 pictorial, as it were, " one mouth," while without the stroke it 

 is r or ro, and so on. The words of a sentence are generally 

 written by a combination of these two methods, that is, by 

 spelling the word first, and then adding a picture sign to re- 



