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 THE WRITING."

EGYPTOLOG Y —E IDEE, 731 It has alieady been explained that the writing expresses only betic characters, especially in the time of the Old Kingdom no consonants. In the Graeco - Roman period various imperfect advance was ever made towards excluding the cumbersome wordattempts were made to render the vowels in foreign names and signs and biliteral phonograms, which, by a judicious use of deterwords by the semi-vowels as also by _ q s the consonant 'aiyin might well have been rendered quite superfluous. which originally represented, having been reduced in speech minatives, Pal.-eograthv. — Hieroglyphic. — The main division is into by that time to the power of aleph only. Thus, IlroAe/mios is monumental or epigraphic hieroglyphs and written hierospelt Ptwrmys, Antoninus, 'Nt’nynws or Yntnyns, &c. &c. Much glyphs. The former may be rendered by the sculptor or earlier, throughout the New Kingdom, a special “syllabic” the painter in stone, on wood, &e., with great delicacy of deorthography was used for foreign names and words ; according to tail or may be simply sunk or painted in outline. When finely W. Max Muller (Asien und JSuropa, 1893, chap, v.), this represents rendeied they are of great value to the student investigating an endeavour to express the vocalization ; but, if so, it was carried the origins of their values. No other system of writing bears out with very little system. upon its face so clearly the history of its development^as the Determinatives.—Almost any sign can be used as a determin- Egyptian ; yet even in this a vast amount of work is still reative, but there are certain generic determinatives that are veryJ quired to detect and disentangle the details. Monumental hierocommon, e.y. :— glyphic did not cease till the 3rd century a.d. The written hieroglyphs, formed by the scribe with the reed pen on papyrus ($h » actions of the mouth—eating and speaking, likewise leather, wooden tablets, &c., have their outlines more or less silence, and hunger. abbreviated^ producing eventually the cursive scripts hieratic and demotic. The written hieroglyphs were employed at all periods, /WWW /www, ripple-lines ; of liquid. especially for religious texts. 'WWVA Hieratic. A kind of cursive hieroglyphic or hieratic writing is found even in the 1st Dynasty. In the Middle Kingdom it is , hide ; of animals, also leather, &c. well characterized, and in its most cursive form seems hardly to retam any definable trace of the original hieroglyphic pictures. I he style varies much at different periods. Demotic. Widely varying degrees of cursiveness are at all periods observable m hieratic ; but, about the XXVIth Dynasty which inaugurated a great commercial era, there was something like a definite parting between the uncial hieratic and the most cursive form afterwards known as demotic. The employment of the one a sealed papyrus-roll; of books, teaching, law, and of was thenceforth almost confined to the copying of religious texts abstract ideas generally. on papyrus, while the other was used for all common purposes, Orthography.—The most primitive form of spelling in the towards the end of the Ptolemaic period, though hieroglyphic and hieroglyphic system would be by one sign for each word, and the hieratic continued to be employed, demotic became the medium for monuments oi the 1st Dynasty show a decided tendency to this writing every class of text, literary and religious works as well as mode. Examples of it in later times are preserved in the royal the legal documents and letters, to which its use up to that time cartouches, for here the monumental style demanded special con- seems to have been practically limited. The cursive ligatures of ciseness. Thus, for instance, the name of Thothmes III. old demotic had given birth to new symbols which were carefully and distinctly formed, and an epigraphic variety was engraved on stone, as in the case of the Rosetta Stone itself. One of the most MN-HPR-R'—is spelled (O (As R' is the name of the characteristic distinctions of later demotic is the minuteness of the Sun-god, with customary deference to the deity it is written first writing. though pronounced last.) A number of common words—preposihad. long been bilingual when, in papyri of the tions, &c. —with only one consonant are spelled by single alpha- 2ndEgypt century A.D., we begin to find transcripts of the betic signs m ordinary writing. Word-signs used singly for the Egyptian language into Greek letters ■ so written we have names of objects are generally marked with | in classical writing, a magical text and a horoscope, probably made by tPp (Q> as foreigners or for their use. The infinite superiority of the — | > yb> “heart,” *, hr, “face,”&c. But the use of bare word-signs is not common. Flexional con- Greek alphabet with its full notation of vowels was readily sonants are almost always marked by phonograms, except in very seen, but religious scruples as yet barred the way to its full adoption. The triumph of Christianity banished the old early times ; as when the feminine word = z.t, “cobra,” is system once and for all j even at the beginning of the 4th century the native Egyptian script scarcely survived spelled ^ ^. Also, if a sign had more than one value, a phono- north of the Nubian frontier at Phike; a little later it expired entirely, leaving six signs as a legacy to the gram would be added to indicate which of its values was intended : Coptic alphabet. For investigations into the origins of hieroglyphs, see Petrie’s thus !j. in ^ is itv, “he,” but in ^ it is &tn, “king.” Medum, 1892, and the Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of Further, owing to the vast number of signs employed, to prevent confusion of one with another in rapid writing they were generally provided with “phonetic complements,” a group being less easily
 * of plants and fibres.
 * of flesh.

ion,? ®xpl°raoftion Fund, especially Hasan, of pt.Ptahiii. 1896 ; A Collection Hieroglyphs, 1898 ; andBeni TheMastaba hetep and Akhethetep, pt. i. 1900. (F Ll g ^

misread than a single letter. E.g. ^, wd, “command,” is regu-

Ell l'©n,F© I cl j formerly a town of Prussia, now united municipally with Cologne (q.v.). Population (1900), 26,895.

larly written |

wd{w); but |, hz, “white,” is written

n, hz{z). Redundance in writing is the rule ; for instance, V is often spelled J

(&)6* (’). Biliteral phonogr ams are

very rare as phonetic complements, nor are two biliteral phonograms employed together in writing the radicals of a word. Spelling of words purely in phonetic or even alphabetic characters is not uncommon, the determinative being generally added. Thus in the pyramid texts we find in one copy of a text ]}pr, “become,” written

in another ^ D. ' Such variant spell-

ings are very important for fixing the readings of word-signs. It is noteworthy that though words were so freely spelled in alpha-

EibenstOClCj a town of Germany, near the Mulde, . ^lles south-south-east by rail of the town and in the circle of Zwickau, kingdom of Saxony. It is a principal seat of the tambour embroidery. Population (1890), 1 7166; (1900), 7468. Eider, a river of Prussia, in the province of SchleswigHolstein. It rises to the south of Kiel, flows first north, then west (with wide-sweeping curves), and after a course of 117 miles enters the North Sea at Tonning. It is navigable up to Rendsburg, and is embanked through the marshes, across which in its lower course it cuts its way. The Eider Canal, constructed in 1777—84, leaves the Eider at the point where it turns to the west and enters the Bay of Kiel at Holtenau. Length, 28 miles; super-