(b) The cursive writing known as Hieratic was an abridged and conventionalised form of the hieroglyphic. The use of the latter became mainly restricted to monumental and kindred purposes, while the hieratic was employed by the priests in copying literary compositions, notable among which was the Book of the Dead, papyrus being the material most commonly used. This was made from the byblus hieraticus or Cyperus papyrus, a plant which flourished in the marshy districts of the Nile. There it has long been extinct, and is now found only in Sicily. It would seem to have served as many useful purposes to the ancient Egyptians as the bamboo serves to-day to the Chinese and other Orientals. "The roots were used for firewood, parts of the plant were eaten, and other and coarser parts were made into paper, boats, ropes, mats, &c." In preparing it for writing material, the outer rind was removed and the pith then cut into strips; which were laid side by side, with another set of strips across them fastened by a thin solution of gum, thus forming a sheet, which was pressed, dried in the sun, and polished to a smooth surface. The sheets were often joined to make a roll, which was sometimes above one hundred feet long and varied in width from six to seventeen inches. The finest papyri of the Book of the Dead are about fifteen inches wide, and, when they contain a tolerably large number of chapters, are from eighty to ninety feet long. Dipping his reed, which was either bruised at the end to make it brush-like, or cut, pen-like, to a point, in the ink-wells of his stone, wooden, or sometimes ivory palette, which was often dedicated to the god Thoth, "lord of divine words," the professional scribe wrote the text in varying colours, chiefly black or red, but also in other tints imitative of the subject dealt with, as blue for sky, yellow for woman, and so forth.
The earliest known specimen of hieratic writing is a papyrus containing chronicles of the reign of King Asa, whose date, according to a moderate estimate of Egyptian chronology, is about 3580 b.c. To the same period the most perfect literary work which has come down to us is usually assigned, although the copy preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, whither it was brought by M. Prisse d'Avennes from Thebes, seems to have been written between 2700 and 2500 b.c. This valuable relic, commonly known after its donor as the Papyrus Prisse, is entitled the "Precepts of Ptah-Hetep," and its contents justify the judgment of Dr. Wallis Budge, that "if all other monuments of the great civilisation of Egypt were wanting, it alone would show the moral worth of the Egyptians, and the high ideals of man's duties which they had formed nearly five thousand five hundred years ago."
(c) The Demotic or Enchorial characters preserve but slight traces of their derivation from picture-writing. As the term hieratic (Greek hieratikos, sacerdotal) denotes the class by whom that writing was used, so the terms demotic (Greek demotikos, of the people) and enchorial (Greek enchōrios, of the country) denote that this writing was in popular use, being adapted to the purposes of daily life. It appears to have come into use about 900 b.c., and so continued till the fourth century of our era. It has been shown that in the time of Darius and other rulers of the Achæmean dynasty, proclamations and documents of general importance were set forth in three languages—Babylonian, Medic, and Persian. So, in the time of the Ptolemies, who inherited the Egyptian possessions of Alexander the Great and ruled in the Nile Valley till it fell under the sway of Rome, all matters of public importance were made known in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek characters. The hieroglyphic was called the "writing of divine words"; the demotic, "writing of letters"; and the Greek, "writing of the Greeks."
CHAPTER VII
THE ROSETTA STONE
The expressions given above occur on the famous Rosetta Stone, an inscribed slab of black basalt, which has proved to be of priceless value in supplying the key to the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, thus fulfilling a purpose corresponding to that of the Behistun rock inscriptions in the interpretation of cuneiform writing. The slab—which is preserved in the British Museum—takes its name from its discovery among the ruins of a fort near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, where it was found by a French officer in 1799. On the capitulation of Alexandria to the British, the stone, whose importance had been detected by the savants attached, by the foresight of Napoleon, to his expedition, came by good fortune under the charge of Sir William Hamilton, whose interest in Egyptian antiquities was keen. It is not perfect, but enough has survived to suffice for decipherment of the general tenor of the inscriptions. Speculation as to the meaning of the hieroglyphs had been rife for centuries, for although they remained in use one hundred and fifty years after the Ptolemies began to reign (305 b.c.), and although the names of Roman emperors were written in them as late as the third century a.d., only a few among the classical writers whose works we possess have anything of value to say on the matter. It was not until the early decades of the present century that the ingenuity of two Egyptologists, Young and Champollion, working independently (as, years later, Adams and Leverrier worked at the problem of the discovery of Neptune), wrested their secret from the hieroglyphs. Honour lies only in lesser degree with some immediate predecessors, among them Zoëga, who rightly conjectured that the oblong rings enclosed royal names, because these "cartouches," as they are called, appeared above the series of sitting figures in temple sculptures; and Akerblad, who published an alphabet of the demotic characters on the Rosetta Stone.
Dr. Thomas Young was a very remarkable man. Born of Quaker parents in 1773, he gave his youth to literature, languages, and mechanics, and at thirty won the Fellowship of the Royal Society, having two years before then accepted the Professorship of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution. Made easy in circumstances by a legacy from a relative, he applied himself yet more strenuously to physics and philology. The result of his labours in the one was the discovery of the undulatory nature of light (which has its analogy in sound-waves), in opposition to Newton's corpuscular or emission theory; and, in the other, a partial decipherment of the demotic characters, and correct identification of the names of a few of the Egyptian gods—Rā, Nut, Thoth, Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys—and of the names Ptolemy and Berenice. He died in 1829.
Jean François Champollion, of whom Dr. Wallis Budge speaks as "the immortal discoverer of a correct system of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics," was born in 1790. Like Young, he betook himself early to the study of languages, and at the age of thirteen was "master of a fair knowledge of Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee." In his twenty-second year he became Professor of Ancient History to the Faculty of Letters at Grenoble, and, with a certain impulse to the quest given by acquaintance with the labours of Young and others, he revised their system and developed his own, making tours to the museums of Turin, Rome, and Naples for the study of papyri, and passing thence to Egypt, where he secured a large body of materials. Death overtook him in 1832, but not before he had accomplished the chief aim of his life in demonstrating that the hieroglyphic characters are partly pictures of objects and partly signs of sounds.