M. Arago on the Egyptian Hieroglyphkal Writings. 43 



of them, symbolical characters, representative of ideas, were 

 much used. Horapollon has even preserved the meaning of a 

 certain number of these characters : thus it is known that the 

 hawk represents the soul ; the ibis, the heart ; the pigeon, which 

 will appear sufficiently strange, a passionate man ; a flute, a mad- 

 man ; the number sixteen, a voluptuary ; a frog, an imprudent 

 man ; the ant, wisdom ; a running knot, love ; &c. &c. 



The symbols thus preserved by Horapollon supply but a very 

 small proportion of the eight or nine hundred characters which 

 have been observed on monumental inscriptions. The mo- 

 derns, and Kircher among the rest, have endeavoured to aug- 

 ment the number of these symbolical characters ; but their ef- 

 forts were useless, except in demonstrating how far the best in- 

 formed men will go astray, when, in search of facts, they with- 

 out restraint abandon themselves to the flights of fancy. From 

 the absence of sufficient data, the interpretation of the Egyptian 

 writings had long appeared to all well informed men a problem 

 wholly insoluble; when, in 1799, an ingenious officer, M. Bous- 

 sard, discovered in the trenches he was clearing near Rosetta, a 

 large stone covered with three sets of characters, entirely dis- 

 tinct. One of these sets was Greek. This, notwithstanding 

 considerable mutilations, expressed that the authors of the mo- 

 nument had ordered that the same inscription should be written 

 on the stone in three kinds of characters, viz. in the sacred or 

 Egyptian hieroglyphic character ; in the local or common charac- 

 ters, and in Greek letters : thus, by an unlooked for piece of good 

 fortune, philologists found themselves in possession of a Greek 

 text, having in connexion its translation into the Egyptian lan- 

 guage ; or, at least, a copy of it, in the two kinds of character 

 which were anciently employed on the banks of the Nile. 



The stone of Rosetta, which has since become so famous, 

 and with which M. Boussard paid fealty to the Institute of 

 Cairo, had been conveyed to that learned body, at the time that 

 the French army evacuated Egypt. It is now in the British 

 Museum, where it stands, says Young, a trophy to British 

 valour ! But, valour apart, the celebrated physician might 

 have added, without excess of partiality, that this invaluable 

 two-tongued monument, bore likewise some testimony to those 

 enlightened views which had presided over all the details of 



