Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/35

 in Holland, Lieblein in Sweden, Golenischeff in Russia, Dévéria, J. de Rougé, Horrack, Maspero, Lefébure, Pierret, Grébaut, Robiou, Baillet and Rochemonteix in France, Naville at Geneva, Bossi, Szedlo and Schiaparelli in Italy, are autborities familiar to every Egyptologist. To these I must add Canon Cook and Professor Lushington in this country.

Recovery of the Ancient Language.

It is not without a melancholy feeling that I enumerate these names (many of them belonging to dear and valued friends), for the hand of death has already thinned our ranks, and some of us are growing old and disabled. The spell, however, is broken; the language of ancient Egypt has really been recovered—slowly, it is true, and step by step. The decipherment of a language does not at once put us in possession of a language. The ancient Etruscan writings are read with ease, but they are as unintelligible as ever. The relationship between Coptic and old Egyptian happily enabled Champollion to find the meanings of many words and the general sense of entire inscriptions. But the old Egyptian vocabulary, besides representing an earlier stage of the language, is very much more extensive than the Coptic, and the greater part of the words which compose it had to be recovered, one after another, by an inductive process. The truth of the vocabulary which has thus gradually been built up is