*

and marrow of the prize essay are extracted from the Nuptiæ Sacræ; the learned author of which may fairly lay claim to about forty-five pounds odd shillings of the St. David's Society's premium. We should have been backward in imputing a deliberate system of pillage to Mr. Tebbs, had he not just altered the language of the author from whom he borrows to make it his own; had he not expressly quoted one or two sentences from the anonymous pamphlet, as a blind to his unacknowledged use of others; or, lastly, had he any where mentioned the title of the pamphlet in question. We cannot forbear adducing one instance of Mr. Tebbs's real want of knowledge on the subject of his essay. After having quoted the opinions of various commentators on our Saviour's limitation of divorce, all of them given in the Nuptiæ Sacræ; he observes, Thus unanimous are the most approved of the expositors on this interesting and important subject. They have been stated at length, because considerable variations of sentiment have prevailed respecting it with some individuals of no ordinary powers, particularly one of the bishops of Rochester, in a speech delivered in the House of Peers on the case of Lord Northampton! Will the reader believe, that this 'one of the bishops of Rochester' was no other than Bishop Horsley; and that Mr. Tebbs took his fancy of this bishop, whoever he was, having made a speech on Lord Northampton's case, from the following passage in Nuptiæ Sacræ, where the author says, expressly addressing the learned prelate, 'In the case of Lord Northampton, you applaud the re-marriage of the innocent party,' referring in a note to the Bishop of Rochester's Speech, p. 12. The simple fact was, that some of the speakers on Lord Auckland's bill, Bishop Horsley amongst the rest, alluded to the remarkable case of Lord Northampton.

We do not wish to press too hard upon Mr. Tebbs; who seems to have some ingenuity, and some learning, which, however, when stripped of its furtive colours,' is much reduced in bulk: but we do wish to place in a strong light the inutility, to say no more, of such a society as that, which awarded a prize to Mr. Tebbs's essay, twenty years after the first publication of the work from which it is borrowed, and one year after its re-publication: for the second edition of the Nuptiæ Sacræ appeared in January,

A striking instance of this disingenuousness occurs in p. 125. In Nuptiæ Sacræ, p. 107, is mentioned the persuasion concerning the utter indissolubility of marriage; which, after a few temporary changes, lay floating in the western church, till the improvident orthodoxy of the council of Trent fixed it for ever on the acceptance of the Catholic believer. Mr. Tebbs says, all those opinions, concerning the indissolubility of marringe, which, with the exception of a few temporary changes, lay floating in the western church, till, what has been justly termed "the improvident orthodoxy of the council of Trent," fixed it for ever on the acceptance of the Catholic believer.' Who would not suppose that all this passage was Mr. Tebbs's own, except the words which Ire incloses in inverted commas? He gives not the least intimation where it has been justly termed the improvident,' &c. but refers in a note to Ayliffe's Parergon.

1821; and Mr. Tebbs was crowned with the society's laurel in the December of the same year. We hope it will be the last time that fifty pounds of the principality's money will be so heedlessly spent. At all events, we recommend, in order that the literati of the diocese may have a fair chance of success, without the danger of a similar exposure, that for the time to come the Essays be written in Welch.

ART. XI.-Lettre à M. Dacier, Secrétaire perpétuel de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, relative à l'Alphabet des Hieroglyphes Phonétiques employés par les Egyptiens, &c. &c. Par M. Champollion le Jeune.

1822.

L'

Paris.

ITTLE did Doctor Richardson imagine, when he threw down the gauntlet of defiance to the learned scrutators into the hidden mysteries of hieroglyphical lore, and maintainedthat not a man living could write the name of George the Fourth in those sacred characters,'-little, we say, could he suppose that a few months only should pass away before a complete hieroglyphical alphabet would make its appearance, by the help of which, not only the Doctor, but, every one who pleases, may not only write the name of his present Majesty, but both write and read those of every emperor, king and conqueror of ancient Egypt, from the time of Alexander down to Antoninus Pius. And yet, paradoxical as it may appear, though we can thus read and write with the utmost facility all those names which are found on the public monuments of Egypt, and write billet-doux, as we understand the petit-maîtres of Paris are now doing, in characters of this hieroglyphical alphabet, we are not a single iota advanced in understanding the meaning of any one of these sacred characters, unless when so applied in designating the mere names of foreigners.

Such being the case, we may say, without at all derogating from the merit of M. Champollion's indefatigable labours, that, whether we weigh their value in the scales of utility or novelty, we find little or nothing in them that can repay him for the persevering siege which he has conducted against the pot-hooks of Egypt, for just so many years as the Greeks sat down before Troy; nothing, in fact, of originality in his supposed discovery to console him for the laborious investigation he has patiently submitted to, merely to complete an invention which had been known to so many of his predecessors, but the pursuit of which had deterred them. Of this sad truth he must be fully aware; for M. Champollion is no novice in the discoveries which have been made in Egyptian paleography. In the course of his ten years' lucubrations, he has produced two Memoirs to prove, that neither the hieratic or sacerdotal,

dotal, nor the demotic or vulgar, writing is alphabetic, (as, he says, was generally thought,) but ideographic, like the pure hierogly phics; that is to say, that they are, like the latter, the signs or pictures of ideas, and not the representations of sounds. But neither is this a discovery due to M. Champollion, nor are his results quite correct. The correspondence between the two kinds of writing was first detected by that excellent oriental scholar, M. Silvestre de Sacy, from a close comparison of the enchorial or demotic character with the corresponding Greek on the Rosetta stone. Having observed the words Alexander and Alexandria to occur in two passages of the Greek inscription, he was able to trace two marked groups of characters in the enchorial, which had a strong resemblance to each other, and from which, and their relative position, he was led to conclude, that they respectively represented these two names in the same way, the name of Ptolemy and most of the other proper names in the Greek inscription were traced out in the demotic. With these materials, assisted by some others, the late Mr. Akerblad set to work, and constructed a sort of alphabet, by the help of which several foreign names in the hieroglyphical inscriptions, and in the writing of papyri, were made out; a method by which Doctor Young successfully extended the catalogue, and discovered that the system was equally applicable to the pure hieroglyphics, from which, in fact, the enchorial characters, on a closer comparison, have been ascertained to be derived and abbreviated. :

The present Letter,' therefore, of M. Champollion does nothing more than extend the principle, particularly as it is applicable to the sacred characters, and complete what was before imperfect; and we must do him the justice to say, that he has so far succeeded as to render it perfectly easy for any one to read those names and surnames of the Greek and Ronian sovereigns, who successively governed Egypt, as they appear on almost all the public monuments of that country, mixed up among the hieroglyphical characters, but generally, perhaps always, enclosed within an oval ring. To enable him to analyze these groups of hieroglyphics, and to proceed in the operation of constructing, or rather of arranging, his alphabet, nothing more was wanting than a comparison of those Greek names which had already been detected in the enchorial character on the Rosetta stone, with the corresponding names in the hieroglyphics. Unluckily the name of Ptolemy only was preserved in the hieroglyphical part of the inscription, the others being broken off; but Mr. Bankes's obelisk brought from Phile amply supplied the deficiency, as not only the same name of Ptolemy, in the same characters, appeared thereon, but also an additional name which, from a Greek inscription on the same obelisk, or rather its pedestal, could scarcely admit a doubt of its being that of Cleopatra.

Assuming

Assuming it, therefore, to be so, with these two names M. Champollion set to work. The process was sufficiently obvious. If the same hieroglyphic used for a particular letter in the one, was also applied for the corresponding letter in the other, that hieroglyphic must stand as the representative of the common letter. The Greek alphabet was the one, of course, to which he endeavoured to make the application. The first sign in the ring, supposed to contain the name of Kleopatra, was the quadrant of a circle, which was therefore set down for the letter K: as this sign ought not, so it does not, appear in the name of Ptolemy.

The second sign in the lady's name, is a lion couchant, which ought to represent the letter A, and which is, in fact, the fourth sign in the name of Ptolemy, and consequently represents the same letter in that name also.

The third sign in Cleopatra is a feather, supposed to represent the Greek epsilon, E; and at the end of the name of Ptolemy are two feathers, which are supposed to represent the diphthong AI of the termination ΑΙΟΣ.

The fourth character in the hieroglyphic of Cleopatra is a flower on a bent stalk, which should answer to the O, and is, in fact, the third character in the name of Ptolemy.

The fifth sign is a sort of square or parallelogram, and is the first in the hieroglyphic of Ptolemy, and therefore without doubt represents the letter II.

The vowel A of Cleopatra is a hawk, and is not found in Ptolemy. The T is represented by an open hand, which, in the word Ptolemy, is a semicircle; but M. Champollion afterwards shows that these two signs have been used by the Egyptians as homophonous.

The eighth letter in Cleopatra, P, is represented by a mouth, or acute oval, and is not found in the name of Ptolemy; and the vowel A, or last of Cleopatra, is a repetition of the hawk. The two names, as they appear within their rings, are as under.

These two names, however, furnish but a small portion of the Greek alphabet. M. Champollion, therefore, had recourse to theDescription de l'Egypte,' and among the hieroglyphics copied into that work, and inclosed in oval rings, observed a name which contained several of the signs of the two preceding ones; this name he makes out AAKZENTPE, (being that of Alexander,) which, it appears, is thus written, letter for letter, in the demotic inscription on the Rosetta stone, and also on a papyrus in the Cabinet du Roi, for the name of AAEZANAPOZ. By this name he obtains three additional phonetic characters, K, N, and Z; but the sign of the K here is a vase, a variation which, we think, M. Champollion explains plausibly enough, by supposing that the Egyptians, like the Chinese who had no fixed alphabet, when they had occasion to write a foreign name, took any one sign, the name of which either wholly or in part appeared to them to approach nearest to the sound of the syllable, or letters required. It would therefore necessarily happen, that, having no settled system of sounds, one person might take one character, and another another, to represent the sound required, according as to his ear it appeared to approach the nearest. We find, on this account, in M. Champollion's alphabet, the same letter of the Greek alphabet represented by eight or ten different hieroglyphics.

This is precisely the case with the Chinese. In the multitude of their characters, and the few monosyllabic sounds by which they are represented, no two Chinese would by any chance write a foreigu name in the same characters, yet every Chinese would be able to pronounce them both. The Chinese, however, have not, as M. Champollion conceives, followed the same method as the Egyptians. Their language being altogether syllabic, and each of their numerous characters a monosyllable, the idea of spelling a word by letters never entered their minds. A proper foreign name, or other foreign word, therefore, written in their language, will always contain only just as many characters as the word has syllables; for example, Pto-le-my would be expressed in three characters, and on the upper corner of each would be placed, like the exponents of the powers of algebraic quantities, a small sign of the word mouth () to show that they were merely phonetic, and not significant of their usual meaning.

In the knowledge of Egyptian symbols used to represent ideas, which the hieroglyphics unquestionably are, M. Champollion's alphabet, as we have already said, does not advance us a single step. What he has done, however, may be of some use; it has completely blown to dust all the profound speculations of the Royal Academicians concerning the vast antiquity of the zodiac'

of