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it was necessary to bring forward words, in which the alleged 

 expletive could not be pretended to be properly a part of the 

 word, there being no room for it either in the place where it 

 was found, nor in any other part of the word, to which, accord- 

 ing to the pretended law of transposition of vowels, it might be 

 removed. Such were the instances of Ru-u-i-ha, for Ruha, 

 "evening," the Coptic Ruhe; and Aahu, for Aah, "the 

 moon," which the Greeks have transcribed by the single vowel 

 A. Instances were also adduced, in which an ideagraphic 

 character, or a consonant, appeared as an expletive in a pure 

 Egyptian word ; and also, an instance of two homophonous 

 letters, which took different expletives, being interchanged, 

 namely Tu and Ta, as formatives of the past participle, 

 both of which, it was aiBrmed, should be read without the final 



vowel. 



The principle having been thus established in the age of 



the papyri, it was shewn, in the third place, that it was not 

 confined to that age, but was recognised in the time of the 

 twelfth dynasty, and even previously thereto. This was 

 shewn by a collation of texts, which were repeated in dif- 

 ferent steles, or in different parts of the same slab. It was 

 shewn, in a variety of instances, that the same word was 

 written sometimes with, and sometimes without, a vowel ; 

 which vovvel was, according to the practice of the age of the 

 papyri, the known expletive of the preceding consonant. It 

 was argued that, if a vowel so circumstanced should be re- 

 jected as an expletive in the age of the papyri, it should be 

 so also in the early ages to which the monuments now under 

 consideration belonged. 



In order to explain the origin of this practice, it was 

 affirmed that all the Egyptian phonoglyphs originally repre- 

 sented syllables ; and that, when a limited number of them 

 was selected to represent the initial sounds in the respective 

 syllables, they still retained their old names, as the sounds 

 now appropriated to them could not be uttered alone. The 



