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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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the word by the pictured image . Answering , however , to the name on the Greek inscription , were inscribed within the oval several hieroglyphic pictures which could only be explained on the supposition ( which had indeed crudely occurred to Warburton , but was considered inconsistent with other facts ) , that this hieroglyphic writing ^ as in reality alphabetic ; and next , that this system was compounded partly of characters or hieroglyphics , symbolic
or ideographic , i . e . expressing words by images , and partly of words composed of letters ; such letters representing sounds , not things or ideas at all : —and further observation induced the conjecture , that the significancy in this way of these images , used for alphabetic purposes , arose from their standing for things or objects , the common names or appellations of which , in the ancient spoken language of the country , began with the sound or letter which it was wanted to express .
A little reflection will shew the occasion for this system , bundling and odd as it may at first appear . Picture-writing , or proper hieroglyphics , would very well express sensible and usual images ; but when a proper name , especially a foreign one , came to be written , how was it to be expressed ? In the following way , which furnishes a clue to the whole system . Suppose a person who had only a picture language , had to record a new word ,
say " James ;**—having no picture which would convey the idea , he might say , I will give a series of the usual pictures of common objects , the names of which begin with the sound I want ; and he might draw a jug , an ape , a man , an egg , and a stick , and thus make a hieroglyphic acrostic , that would perpetuate a foreign word which he had no other means of writing .
Singular as this plan may seem , its reality is now supported by striking evidence ; and it is still more singular that it should not only be the rude invention of a barbarous time , but that the invention should have stuck at its first opening , and not have refined into a complete alphabetic system ; and that it should continue even unto the polished age of the Caesars , and be blended
and combined in greater or less proportions with the proper hieroglyphic writing , and not merely be confined to proper names . Proper names , however , being peculiarly marked out , the leading features of all these inscriptions are with this clue easily identified and read , and the age of the monuments is ascertained by learning the persons by whom or to whom they were erected .
After the first guess at this explanation of the system had been hit upon , the next task was to obtain such an acquaintance with the ancient Coptic or Thebaic as would give the probable clue and reason of the power of the letter thus represented by an image ; aud it was soon found that the initiative sound of the word in that language for the thing represented , generally gave , with remarkable precision , the sound or letter required . Thus , in the first instance , the letters in the " Ptolemy" of the hieroglyphic inscription on the Rosetta stone , as fixed by the Greek version , were found to form that
word by taking the initial sound or letter in the ancient Coptic names of the things drawn within the oval . Certain letters being by these means fixed beyond all doubt , the next word , similarly situated and proved by the corresponding translation , being " Birenice , " added some other letters to this new alphabet , which the discoverers called the phonetic alphabet ; and to these were soon added those of the word " Cleopatra , " also discovered with a Greek translation on an obelisk found in the Isle of Phil ®; and thus were
not only some new letters added , but " Cleopatra" and " Ptolemy" having some letters in common which exactly answered in the two hieroglyphic in *
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Egyptian Hieroglyphics . 475
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2 i 2
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1827, page 475, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1798/page/3/
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