Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/27

 supplied to him. His problem lay in dividing the hieroglyphic text into groups or words corresponding to the Greek words. The problem would be completely solved if each Egyptian group were successfully analyzed and read, the verification of the result being found in the facility of reading and interpreting other texts by means of the alphabet and vocabulary thus obtained.

Several of the most eminent scholars in Europe attempted the problem, and some of them even with partial success. The great orientalist Silvestre de Sacy determined the demotic groups corresponding to Ptolemy, Berenike, Alexander and other proper names; and the Swedish scholar Akerblad already, in the year 1802, even drew up a phonetic alphabet of the demotic characters, which is remarkably correct as far as it goes. The complete key to the decipherment of Egyptian was, however, not revealed to the world till the publication of Champollion's letter to M. Dacier in the September of 1822.

Dr. Young.

It is even to this day a common habit of Englishmen to couple the name of their countryman Dr. Thomas Young with that of Champollion, as sharing with him the glory of this discovery. No person who knows anything of Egyptian philology can countenance so gross an error. Dr. Young was indeed a man of