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EGYPTOLOGY

The most magnificent stones and finest work were early in the 1st Dynasty, after which there is a continued deterioration throughout the history. Only soft stones, alabaster and serpentine, were used in the Xllth and XVIIIth Dynasties. The history of the forms has been traced from the YIth to the XVIIIth Dynasties (9). After that time stone was rarely worked into vases. Copper was wrought into thin vessels as early as the 1st Dynasty. The forms of tools and weapons are well known from the Xlth to the XIXth Dynasties (9) (17); and the vessels of bronze from the XVIIIth Dynasty to the Roman age; but much has yet to be done to write a continuous history. Copper alone, or with some hardening such as arsenic, was used till the Xllth Dynasty; and bronze appears general in the XVIIIth. The life-size copper statue of King Pepy I. (Vlth Dynasty) is the largest piece of metal-work preserved; it shows a complete artistic mastery of the material. Textiles have rarely been preserved from the prehistoric time. The finest weaving known is that of the 1st and Vlth Dynasties, in royal wrappings; considerable outfits of the latter age have been found (13). Enormous quantities of mummy linen of the XVIIIth Dynasty to Roman times are found. The coloured textiles and embroideries are of Christian period, preserved owing to the change of burying immediately in the daily dress, instead of embalming (16). The recent works referred to are :— History in general.—Maspero, (1) Dawn of Civilization', (2) Struggle of the Nations; (B) Passing of the Empires (English edition best, being indexed). Petrie, (4) Student’s History of Egypt, vols. i. ii. Wiedemann, (5) Geschichte. Maspero, (6) Egyptian Archceology. Prehistoric.—De Morgan, (7) Recherches, i. ii. Petrie, (8) Naqada ; (9) Diospolis Parva. Early Dynasties.—Quibell, (10) Hierakonpolis, i. Petrie, (11) Koptos-, (12) Royal Tombs, i. ii.; (13) Dcshasheh. VRh-XIIRh Dynasties.—De Morgan, (14) Dahshur. Petrie, (15) Dendereh ; (16) Hawara ; (17) Kahun ; (18) Illahun. XVIIRh-XXth Dynasties.—Maspero, (19) Momies Royales de Deir el Bahari. Petrie, (20) Tell el Amarna ; (21) Syria and Egypt; (22) Six Temples. XXVIth Dynasty and on.—Gardner and Petrie, (23) Naukratis, i. and ii. Petrie, (24) Tanis, ii. {Daphncc). Mahaffy, (25) Empire of the Ptolemies. Milne, (26) Roman Egypt. Grenfell and Hunt, (27) Oxyrhynchus Papyri, <fcc. Journals.—A.Z. Zeitschrift fur JEgyptische Sprache. Recueil, published by Maspero. S.B.A.P. {Proceedings of Society of Biblical Archaeology.) (w. M. P. P.) The Language. The elaborate article on Hieroglyphics by Dr Poole in vol. xi. of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was founded on the then (1880) standard work of De Rouge ; the chief recent developments of Egyptian grammatical knowledge began, however, in that year, and they are of sufficient importance to deserve a somewhat full notice. In 1880 Ludwig Stern (Koptische Grammatik) admirably classified the grammatical forms of Coptic. The much more difficult task of recovering the grammar of Egyptian has occupied a quarter of a century of special study by Adolf Erman and his school at Berlin, and has now reached an advanced stage. The greater part of Egyptian texts after the Middle Kingdom having been written in what was even then practically a dead language, as dead as Latin was to the mediaeval monks in Italy who wrote and spoke it, Erman selected for special investigation those texts which really represented the growth of the language at different periods, and, as he passed from one epoch to another, compared and consolidated his results. The Neucegyptische Grammatik (1880) dealt with texts written in the vulgar dialect of the New Kingdom (Dyns. XVIII. to XX.). Next followed, in the Zeitschrift fur XEgyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde, studies on the Old Kingdom inscription of Una, and the Middle Kingdom contracts of Siut, as well as on an “Old Coptic” text of the 3rd century a.d. At this point a papyrus of stories

[the language.

written in the popular language of the Middle Kingdom provided Erman with a stepping-stone from Old Egyptian to the Late Egyptian of the Neucegyptische Grammatik, and gave the connexions that would bind solidly together the whole structure of Egyptian grammar (see Sprache des Papyrus Westcar, 1889). The very archaic pyramid texts enabled him to sketch the grammar of the earliest known form of Egyptian {Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gcsellschaft, 1892), and in 1894 he was able to write a little manual of Egyptian for beginners {AEgyptische Grammatik), centering on the language of the standard inscriptions of the Middle and New Kingdoms, but accompanying the main sketch with references to earlier and later forms. Of the work of Erman’s pupils we may mention Steindorffs little Koptische Grammatik, 1894, improving greatly on Stern’s standard work in regard to phonology and the relationship of Coptic forms to Egyptian, and Sethe’s Das AEgyptische Verbum, 1899. The latter is an extensive work on the verb in Egyptian and Coptic by a brilliant and laborious philologist. Owing to the very imperfect notation of sound in the writing, the highly important subject of the verbal roots and verbal forms was perhaps the obscurest branch of Egyptian grammar when Sethe first attacked it in 1895. The subject has been reviewed by Erman, Die Flexion des AEgyptischen Verbums in the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy, 1900. The Berlin school, having settled the main lines of the grammar, next turned its attention to lexicography. It has devised a scheme, founded on that for the Latin Thesaurus of the Berlin Academy, which almost mechanically sorts the v7hole number of occurrences of every word in any text Texamined. Scholars in England, America, and Denmark, as v ell as in Germany, are taking part in this great enterprise, and though the completion of it may be far off, the collections of classified material already made are very valuable for consultation. At present Egyptologists depend on Heinrich Brugsch’s admirable but somewhat antiquated Worterbuch and on Levi’s useful but entirely uncritical Vocabolario. Though demotic has not yet received serious attention at Berlin, the influence of that great school has made itself felt amongst demotists, especially in Switzerland, Germany, America, and England. The death of Heinrich Brugsch in 1895 was a very severe blow to demotic studies ; but it must be admitted that his brilliant gifts lay in other directions than exact grammatical analysis. Apart from their philological interest, as giving the history of a remarkable language during a period of several thousand years, the grammatical studies of the last quarter of the 19th century are beginning to bear fruit in regard to the exact interpretation of historical documents on Egyptian monuments and papyri. Not long ago the supposed meaning of these was extracted chiefly by brilliant guessing, and the published translations of even the best scholars could carry no guarantee of more than approximate exactitude, where the sense depended at all on correct recognition of the syntax. Now' the translator proceeds in Egyptian with some of the sureness with which he would deal with Latin or Greek. The meaning of many words may be still unknown, and many constructions are still obscure ; but at least he can distinguish fairly between a correct text and a cornipt text. Egyptian writing lent itself only too easily to misunderstanding, and the writings of one period were but half intelligible to the learned scribes of another. The mistaken readings of the old inscriptions by the priests at Abydos, when attempting to record the names of the kings of the 1st Dynasty on the walls of the temple of Sety L, are now admitted on all sides ; and no palaeographer, whether his field be Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, or any other class of MSS., will be surprised to hear that the Egyptian papyri and inscriptions abound in corruptions and mistakes. The translator of to-day can, if he wishes, mark where certainty ends and mere conjecture begins, and it is to be hoped that advantage will be taken more widely of this new power. The Egyptologist who has long lived in the realm of conjecture is too prone to consider any series of guesses good enough to serve as a translation, and forgets to insert the notes of interrogation which would warn workers in other fields from implicit trust. The stages of the language are now distinguished as follows:— Old Egyptian.—This is properly the language of the Old Kingdom. In it we have (a) the recently discovered inscriptions of the 1st Dynasty, too brief and concise to throw much light on the language of that time; and the great collections of spells and ritual texts found inscribed in the Pyramids of the Vth and Vlth Dynasties, which must even then have been of high antiquity, though they contain later additions made in the same style. (6) A few historical texts and an abundance of short inscriptions representing the language of the I Vth, Vth, and Vlth Dynasties.