Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/482

 474 EGYPT (LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) (nen), not, and (nent), are the principal forms of negation, combined with put or sep ; they signify never. (m) is used as a prohibitive negative. Conjunctions are often omitted; (hud), and, %L ^^ (mak), because, and ( Met/), when, are those chiefly used. Prepo- sitions put before the verb have also the force of conjunctions : ' (en) or I > ( an f r that; ^k (em), inasmuch, &c. The syn- tax consists chiefly in making the sentences short, rarely exceeding ten words; making the verb agree with the subject in number, but putting the verbal root, if alone, always in the singular ; prefixing prepositions and inter- jections to the noun or verb which they gov- ern; and putting the adverb last. The sen- tence consists often of two antithetical mem- bers, in which a substitution of different pro- nouns frequently occurs, transitions being ab- ruptly made from different persons among themselves. The following is a portion of an inscription found in the tomb of Amenis in Beni-Hassan, dating from the 12th dynasty : H 'A 1* /vwv si w i 4 The order both of the columns and the hiero- glyphs is from left to right. Verbally translated it reads as follows: 1. nuk neb aamt 1 am a lord excellent 2, uah mert heka very beloved ruler 8. mer tamaf arna Tear loving his country passed I for 4. renpau em heka em years as the ruler of 5. S(ih baku neb en Sah the work all of 6. sutna khfper em tuta. the palace was done by my hand. It may be rendered thus : "I was an excellent and very beloved person, a ruler beloved in his district. I passed many years as the ruler of Sah (Speos Artemidos). All the work of the palace was done by my hand." The history of the recovery of the Egyptian language, of which not only the vocabulary but also the characters were totally unknown, presents a wonderful process of induction. The earlier Greeks and Romans were so little interested in the speech of other nations, and at the same time such imperfect linguists, that they left no other information concerning the language than that the Egyptians had two or three different kinds of writing, used for different purposes, and that two of them were con- fined to sacred uses, which is now known to be erroneous. Their other accounts of the Egyptians and their language are with few exceptions entirely wrong. They picked up stories here and there from communicative priests, and these, mixed up without dis- crimination, passed from one writer to an- other, no one caring to criticise, compare, or methodize them. The learned men who in the last century turned their attention to Egyptian writing naturally consulted the works of the ancients, and were consequently led astray. With the exception of a single passage in Clemens Alexandrinus, which is so obscure that it lends itself to many interpreta- tions, all the ancients agreed in speaking of the hieroglyphic system as ideographic. They even gave the meaning of a few signs which are common in the inscriptions, and seemed to be well informed as to their interpretation. As the hieratic and demotic character appeared more cursive, and better suited to the tran- scription of long documents, they maintained that by means of them the same language was written in letters representing sounds. The writings of Kircher during the 17th, and of De Guignes and Koch during the 18th century, and later those of Zoega, were based on the opinions of the Greeks and Romans, and failed consequently to throw light on the language. It happened that in 1V99 a French engineer officer, M. Broussard, throwing up earthworks at Rosetta (Rashid), discovered a large black slab of stone, somewhat mutilated, with an inscription in hieroglyphics, in demotic, and in Greek. The victory of the English a few days later threw it into the hands of the am- bassador Sir William Hamilton, who deposited it in the British museum. By this accident a text was discovered, of which the Greek version stated that it was an ascription of di- vine honors to one of the Ptolemies, and that the hieroglyphic and demotic versions were transcriptions of the Greek text. Though the sense of a hieroglyphic inscription was thus ascertained, the difficulty remained of deter- mining the value and sound of each charac- ter. It was observed that at about the place corresponding to the name of Ptolemy in the Greek version, there was in the hieroglyphic inscription an oval ring enclosing a group of characters ; and as a long series of sitting figures on the temple of Karnak had also such rings placed over them, apparently in- dicating their names or titles, it was conjec- tured that this ring was the sign of the proper name. An amusing account of the false con- jectures made in deciphering this celebrated