OF all the splendid achievements of archÆological research during the present century, there are none of more universal interest and importance than those which are revealing the origin and history of letters; this, not alone for the historic values of these discoveries, for their illumination of a past of which hitherto there was but a faint conception; but also for what letters have to tell us in explanation or confirmation of Biblical narrative, of their bearing upon our most sacred beliefs.

At the beginning of the present century the great mass of testimony now laid open before us was an apparently impenetrable mystery. Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform inscriptions yet remained, for the most part, but confusion of ornament and meaningless signs. Some little advance, it is true, had been reached during the latter part of the eighteenth century, as to the signification of certain hieroglyphic characters, but these were as yet but conjecture; a groping in the dark, with no means to verify, uncertain, unassured.

With the opening of the present century two events occurred which were to place in the hands of scholars the keys to these mysteries. The first in date of these discoveries, though not in results, was the finding of the Rosetta Stone in 1799.

This was an outcome of the French scientific expedition to Egypt under the first Napoleon. At this date, a French artillery officer, named Boussard, while digging among some ruins at Fort St. Julian, near Rosetta, discovered a large stone, of black basalt, covered with inscriptions. This tablet, now known as “The Rosetta Stone,” was of irregular shape, portions having been broken from the top and sides. The inscriptions were in three kinds of writing; the upper text in hieroglyphic characters, the second in a later form of Egyptian writing, called enchorial or demotic, and the third was in Greek. No one of these had been entirely preserved. Of the hieroglyphic text, a considerable portion was lacking; perhaps thirteen or fourteen lines at the beginning. From the demotic, the ends of about half the lines were lost, while the Greek text was nearly perfect, with the exception of a few words at the end.

The immediate inferences were that these three inscriptions were but different forms of the same decree, and that in the Greek would be found some clew for the decipherment of the others. It was first presented to the French Institute at Cairo where it was destined not long to remain.

The surrender of Alexandria to the British, in 1801, placed the Rosetta Stone, by the terms of the treaty, in the hands of the British Commissioner. This gentleman, himself a zealous scholar and keenly alive to the importance of the treasure, at once dispatched it to England, where it was presented by George III to the British Museum.

A fac simile of the inscriptions was made in 1802, by the “Society of Antiquaries,” of London, and copies were soon distributed among the scholars of Europe. When the Greek inscription was read, it was found to be a decree by the priests of Memphis in honor of King Ptolemy Epiphanes; B. C. 198;

That, in acknowledgment of many and great benefits conferred upon them by this king, they had ordered this decree should be engraved upon a tablet of hard stone in hieroglyphic, enchorial and Greek characters; the first, the writing sacred to the priests; the second, the language or script of the people, and the third that of the Greeks, their rulers.

Also, that this decree, so engraved, should be set up in the temples of the first, second and third orders, near the image of the ever living King.

It might be supposed that with this clew the work of decipherment would be readily accomplished. On the contrary, many of the most distinguished scholars of Europe tried, during the twenty following years, without success.

The chief obstacle in the way was the prevailing opinion that the pictorial forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs were mainly ideographic symbols of things. In consequence, the absurd conceptions read into these characters, led all who attempted the decipherment of these far away from the truth.

It is true that Zoega, a Danish archÆologist, and Thomas Young, an English scholar, each independently, about 1787, had made the discovery that the hieroglyphs in the ovals represented royal names, and were perhaps alphabetic; but the signification of these characters were never fully comprehended by either of these great scholars.

The claim made by the friends of Mr. Young as the first discoverer of the true methods of decipherment, rests upon the fact that he gave the true phonetic values to five of these characters in the spelling of the names of certain royal personages, and in 1819 published an article announcing this discovery. He seems, however, to have had so little confidence in this conception that he went no farther with it, and still later, in 1823, lost the prestige he might have gained, by the publication as his belief, that the Egyptians never made use of signs to express sound until the time of the Roman and Greek invasions of Egypt.

The real work of decipherment was reserved for Champollion, who, born at Grenoble, in 1790, was but nine years old when the famous stone was discovered which later on was to yield to him the long lost language of the hieroglyphs.

Among the characters on the Rosetta Stone, in the hieroglyphic text, were to be found certain pictorial forms enclosed in an oval. It had hitherto been suggested that these ovals contained characters signifying royal names. Were these symbolic signs, or how were they to be interpreted? Champollion concluded that some of these signs expressed sound and were alphabetic in character. Thus, if the signs in the cartouche supposed to signify Ptolemy, could be found to be identical, letter for letter, with the Ptolemaios of the Greek inscription, an important proof would be obtained. It so happened that on an obelisk found at PhilÆ there was a hieroglyphic inscription, which, according to a Greek text on the same shaft should be that of Cleopatra. If, then, the signs for P, t and l in Ptolemaios corresponded with the signs for p, t and l in Cleopatra, the identity of these as alphabetic signs would be confirmed. The comparison fully justified his theory, and further confirmation was supplied by further comparisons, until he finally came into possession of hieroglyphic signs for all the consonants.

Again; certain indications convinced him that these characters appearing in proper names must be also initial letters or initial sounds of Egyptian words of which these signs were the pictorial representations. If this was so, the sign for the letter L, which in the royal names was the picture of a lion, must be the beginning of some word signifying “lion,” which in old Egyptian would begin with the letter or first syllabic sound of L.

The pictorial sign for the letter R was the mouth. The word for mouth, then, in Egyptian must begin with the letter or syllabic sign for R, and so forth.

The early opportunities which Champollion had enjoyed for the preparation of his great work were peculiarly significant. He was educated by his elder brother, a man of great learning, professor of Greek in the Academy of Grenoble, whose companionship early influenced the direction of his younger brother to linguistic studies. In addition to this, the intense interest aroused throughout Europe by the vast collection of antiquities brought thither by the men of letters and science who accompanied Napoleon’s army in Egypt, had compelled the attention of scholars to this special field of research as never before.

With this guidance, and moved by the spirit of the times, Champollion’s studies in ancient Greek led him to an early acquaintance with the Coptic language. It is said that, as a result of this study, at the age of sixteen he read a paper before his academy, maintaining that the Coptic was the language of the ancient Egyptians. This is not now a spoken language, having been supplanted by the Arabic since the seventeenth century, A. D. It, however, survives in the service ritual of the Coptic churches of to-day, and, though written in old Greek characters, the ancient language is still heard, though but few understand it.

As Champollion made use of his hieroglyphic alphabet for the spelling of other words than proper names, his satisfaction may be imagined when he found that these were Coptic words. Thus, the sign for “mouth” for the letter R, was the initial letter or syllabic sign of the Coptic word Ro, signifying mouth. The picture of a lion for the letter L also represented the initial letter or initial syllable of Lavo, the Coptic for lion. The picture of an eagle, representing the sign for the letter A, is also the sign for the initial sound or letter in Ahem, the Coptic for eagle, and so on.

The language, then, of the Hieroglyphs was Coptic, or rather in the Coptic we have a survival of the ancient Egyptian, the language of the pyramid builders. More correctly speaking, it is the Egyptian language of the Ptolemaic period, corrupted with Arabic and Greek idioms, but still including the language of old Egypt.

It was, indeed, a thing which might have been expected, that the language expressed by the ancient Hieroglyphs should bear a resemblance to Coptic, but that the resemblance should be as close as it has proved could scarcely have been expected.

Again, of special interest in this connection, is the fact that in the Greek the writing and language of Egypt should be thus preserved.

^[1]“The romance of language could go no further,” says Mr. Butler, “than to join the speech of Pharaoh and the writing of Homer in the service book of an Egyptian Christian.”

At this point, a brief reference, bridging the centuries from the decline of the use of hieroglyphics to the later appearance of the language in its Coptic and Greek forms, should have a place.

The extensive use of Phoenician and Greek alphabets in Egypt and throughout the Orient, for some centuries before the Christian era, had affected the Egyptian script as a social and commercial medium. The hieroglyphics, however, held their own with the priesthood, for sacred and secular uses, until the time of the Emperor Trajanus Decius, 249-252, A. D., which is the latest period in which we find them employed for monumental purposes.

A little over a century later,—with the spread of Christianity, the decline of paganism, the destruction of the Egyptian temples and the dispersion of the priesthood under the Emperor Theodosius,—the interpretation of the hieroglyphics was gradually lost, not again to be read and understood until the discovery and interpretation of the Rosetta Stone.

In 1822 Champollion announced the results of his studies to the “Academy of Inscriptions” of Paris, and followed this by the publication of his work on the “Hieroglyphic System of the Ancient Egyptians,” in which he discussed the proofs that the phonetic alphabet was used in the royal legends of all ages and is the key to the whole hieroglyphic system.

It will be remembered that those who before Champollion had undertaken the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, had based their efforts on the theory that these signs were mainly ideographic. With this as a working theory, all advance was impossible. Champollion, on the contrary, finding the Egyptian system including a phonetic structure, made this a basis for research, achieving a brilliant success. He never fully recognized the composite character of these phonetic signs. From these he constructed an alphabet of nearly two hundred signs, to which his pupil, Salvolini, added one hundred more, thus producing an alphabet of nearly three hundred characters. As Lepsius was to show a little later, while these signs are all phonetic, only a small number—thirty-four in all—are alphabetic, the remainder representing syllables.

It is impossible, in this brief survey, to refer to the special advancements made by other distinguished scholars in this field of research. Since the death of Champollion the work of decipherment has progressed steadily on until the life, the literature and the language of the old Egyptians are open pages which all may read.

There are, however, many things not yet fully understood. Of the Rosetta Stone, two of the texts may now be said to be fully translated; namely, the Greek and the hieroglyphic. This has not been possible until recently, in consequence of the mutilated condition of the tablet, a considerable portion of the hieroglyphic text and part of the demotic, being included in the fragment broken off and lost. Not long ago, however, another stele was found at En Nobeira, near Dammamour, containing a duplicate copy of the Rosetta texts in perfect condition. This is now in the museum at Boulak.

The demotic text has never yet been fully translated. This writing is a cursive script, developed from the hieratic to express the vulgar dialect spoken by the people. As hieratic bears the same relation to hieroglyphic that ordinary writing does to printing, so the demotic, which is a further abridgment of the hieratic, is compared to the latter as bearing the same relation which short-hand does to writing. Some of these latent signs have been identified, but not all.

The first five lines of a Papyrus (containing 75 lines), being the beginning of an ancient hymn addressed to the Deity, are added in the original Hieratic, with the transcription in Hieroglyphic characters. The Hieratic is read from right to left, the Hieroglyphic from left to right. The dots in the middle or end of the lines, written in red ink in the original manuscript, indicate that this is a poetic composition.