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IX.] since the beginning of the Christian era; until, in our own century, it has been recovered by the zeal and industry of a few devoted men, among whose names that of Champollion stands foremost. The reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian tongue, though by no means complete, is sufficiently advanced to allow us to see quite clearly its general character. It was but an older form of the modern Coptic. The Coptic has itself gone out of existence within the past three or four centuries, extinguished by the Arabic; but we possess a tolerably abundant Christian Coptic literature, representing two or three slightly different dialects, written in an alphabetic character chiefly adapted from the Greek, and dating back to the early centuries of our era. The differences are comparatively slight between the old Egyptian of the hieroglyphical monuments and the later Coptic, for the exceedingly simple structure of the language has saved it from the active operation of linguistic change. A transitional step, too, between the one and the other is set before us in the series of records, mostly in papyrus rolls, which are called hieratic and demotic, from the characters in which they are written, modified forms of the hieroglyphs, adapted to a more popular use: these records come from the last five or six centuries preceding our era, and represent, doubtless, the popular speech of the period.

A number of other African dialects are claimed to exhibit affinities of material and structure with the language of Egypt. They fall into three groups: the Ethiopian or Abyssinian, of which the Galla is at present the most important member; the Libyan or Berber, extending over a wide region of northern Africa, from Egypt to the Atlantic ocean; and the Hottentot, embracing the dialects of the degraded tribes of Hottentots and Bushmen at the far southern extremity of the continent: these last have been but recently recognized as showing signs of probable relationship with the rest. The family, as thus made up, is styled the Hamitic (by a name correlative to Semitic and Japhetic): its constitution and relations, however, are still matters of