Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/32

 in every line, but in nearly every word, and of the law of this use. And neither Akerblad, nor, since the language had ceased to be spoken, had any one else before Champollion a notion of this.

The truth of Champollion's alphabet was demonstrated by its enabling one to read the name not only of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, but of all the Persian, Greek and Roman sovereigns of the country. And, what was far more important still, the meanings of many hieroglyphic groups, on being read according to his system, were immediately known from the Coptic vocabulary. Champollion's hypothesis that the old Egyptian language was identical with Coptic, though a very imperfect one, and productive even at the present day of many errors among those who discard it, was not fatally wrong, for Coptic is in fact a later stage of the language in which the hieroglyphic texts are written, and the vocabulary of the latter is full of words which are as intelligible to the Coptic scholar as the infinitives of Latin verbs are to a mere Italian scholar. The remaining years of his short life were spent in copying, studying and interpreting Egyptian texts. The amount of work accomplished by him in eight years is almost incredible. He not only laid the foundations of a Grammar and Dictionary, but illustrated the history and religion of ancient Egypt by the translations and analyses of short but authentic texts, opening an entirely new world to the historical student, and