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EGYPT (LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) 475 ption, based on the assumption of the Greeks that the hieroglyphic signs were purely ideographic, is given by Birch in Wilkinson's "Egyptians under the Pharaohs." The great discovery that the character was a mixed one, containing partly pictures of objects and partly signs of sounds, was announced by Cham- pollion in a paper read at Grenoble in 1810, and soon after by Thomas Young. Champol- lion acknowledged that he was led to the dis- covery by the labors of De Sacy and Aker- blad, who had shown that the Greek proper names on the Rosetta stone were transcribed phonetically in the demotic version. These results were obtained by guessing that a group occurring in almost every line was the conjunc- tion; and that a group repeated 29 times in the demotic version corresponded to king in the Greek, where this word occurred about the same number of times ; and for the words Alexander and Alexandria in the 4th and 17th lines of the Greek, were discovered two groups of equally close resemblance in the 2d and 10th lines of the demotic. Young's most important contribution was to assert the ideographic na- ture of many demotic signs, in opposition to the current belief that hieratic and demotic writing were entirely phonetic. It was there- upon observed that the hieratic and demotic characters were abbreviations of the fuller pic- tures; and Brugsch, now the highest authority on the language, shows in his Grammaire demotique that demotic contains at least as many ideographic signs as hieratic writing. All these conjectures were at first applied only to the characters inside the rings. But there remained the difficulty of determining the or- der in which the characters were" written, which might be, as in Hebrew, from right to left, or, as in modern systems, from left to right. This point was soon settled by Cham- pollion. Mr. Bankes brought a little obelisk found in the island of Phil, which was in- scribed with a dedication in Hebrew and Greek to a Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra. This inscription was copied by Cail- liaud in 1816, ^/ and commented on by Letronne and Champollion in the French sci- entific journals in 1822. Figs. 1 and 2 are the hieroglyphs for Cleopatra and Ptolemy. There was a ring identical with the ring for Ptolemy in the Rosetta stone, and another for Cleopatra. By a fortunate coincidence these names have several letters in common. Assuming from the analogy of other systems that the ob- jects depicted signified the initial letter of their Coptic names, both groups were spell- ed out, and Champollion was in possession of 11 phonetic signs of the old Egyptian Ian- guage. It now became plain that in this case the signs were not syllabic, but alphabetic. Applying them to monuments which appeared to be of the Roman epoch, and attempting to decipher the royal rings upon them, Cham- pollion found an almost complete list of the Roman emperors, each with his title, emperor, added, and this title became a clue to all similar inscriptions. Some of the opponents of Cham- pollion suggested that the hieroglyphs were only used phonetically in order to transcribe the names of the foreign lords of Egypt ; but further researches proved that well known old Egyptian kings, as Psammetichus, Shishak, and Rameses, had their names written in phonetic characters also. These discoveries made it certain that the hieroglyphic inscriptions could only be read by ascertaining the sounds of the old Egyptian language; if the writing were pictorial or symbolical, the sense could have been discovered without knowing a single sound. To discover the sounds, several learned men turned to the modern Egyptian or Coptic language, which was expressly stated by early Christian fathers to be almost the same as the demotic, though written in a different alphabet. Though the Coptic language was almost ex- tinct, there was a school of Coptic priests at Rome during the last century, who could still speak the language of their sacred books ; and from the information they possessed, together with the Coptic version of the Scriptures, a very good knowledge not only of the grammar but also of the vocabulary had been obtained. Champollion made himself master of the Cop- tic language, and saw that it retained more or less accurately the old Egyptian names of a large number of objects. He further analyzed grammatical forms, terminations, and inflec- tions, and found the same close correspon- dence. When he was sent to Egypt to explore the ruins in person, he applied what letters he knew to groups of hieroglyphics, apparently giving the names of numerous pictures of well known objects, engraved in the tombs of Beni Hassan, and found that the Coptic furnished in almost every case a direct clue to the sound of the hieroglyphs. He thereupon easily com- pleted his alphabet from partially read words, agreeing in sense with known names ; and so the great discovery was gradually completed, sounds suggesting signs, and signs sounds, each new step verifying and correcting previous in- ferences as well as suggesting new ones. Two difficulties impeded the progress of the dis- covery. The first was to understand the prop- er application of the symbolical hieroglyphs, and when the same sign was to be used in the ideographic and when in the phonetic sense. Champollion concluded that the written system of 1,000 signs, used at random ideographically or phonetically, must have been a source of confusion to the Egyptians themselves, and that they must have used some means to avoid it. He therefore looked for and found indica- tions added to the pictures, informing the