As Champollion made use of his hieroglyphic alphabet for the spelling of other words than proper names, his satisfaction may be imagined when he found that these were Coptic words. Thus, the sign for “mouth” for the letter R, was the initial letter or syllabic sign of the Coptic word Ro, signifying mouth. The picture of a lion for the letter L also represented the initial letter or initial syllable of Lavo, the Coptic for lion. The picture of an eagle, representing the sign for the letter A, is also the sign for the initial sound or letter in Ahem, the Coptic for eagle, and so on.
The language, then, of the Hieroglyphs was Coptic, or rather in the Coptic we have a survival of the ancient Egyptian, the language of the pyramid builders. More correctly speaking, it is the Egyptian language of the Ptolemaic period, corrupted with Arabic and Greek idioms, but still including the language of old Egypt.
It was, indeed, a thing which might have been expected, that the language expressed by the ancient Hieroglyphs should bear a resemblance to Coptic, but that the resemblance should be as close as it has proved could scarcely have been expected.
Again, of special interest in this connection, is the fact that in the Greek the writing and language of Egypt should be thus preserved.
[[1]]“The romance of language could go no further,” says Mr. Butler, “than to join the speech of Pharaoh and the writing of Homer in the service book of an Egyptian Christian.”
At this point, a brief reference, bridging the centuries from the decline of the use of hieroglyphics to the later appearance of the language in its Coptic and Greek forms, should have a place.
The extensive use of Phœnician and Greek alphabets in Egypt and throughout the Orient, for some centuries before the Christian era, had affected the Egyptian script as a social and commercial medium. The hieroglyphics, however, held their own with the priesthood, for sacred and secular uses, until the time of the Emperor Trajanus Decius, 249-252, A. D., which is the latest period in which we find them employed for monumental purposes.
A little over a century later,—with the spread of Christianity, the decline of paganism, the destruction of the Egyptian temples and the dispersion of the priesthood under the Emperor Theodosius,—the interpretation of the hieroglyphics was gradually lost, not again to be read and understood until the discovery and interpretation of the Rosetta Stone.
In 1822 Champollion announced the results of his studies to the “Academy of Inscriptions” of Paris, and followed this by the publication of his work on the “Hieroglyphic System of the Ancient Egyptians,” in which he discussed the proofs that the phonetic alphabet was used in the royal legends of all ages and is the key to the whole hieroglyphic system.
It will be remembered that those who before Champollion had undertaken the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, had based their efforts on the theory that these signs were mainly ideographic. With this as a working theory, all advance was impossible. Champollion, on the contrary, finding the Egyptian system including a phonetic structure, made this a basis for research, achieving a brilliant success. He never fully recognized the composite character of these phonetic signs. From these he constructed an alphabet of nearly two hundred signs, to which his pupil, Salvolini, added one hundred more, thus producing an alphabet of nearly three hundred characters. As Lepsius was to show a little later, while these signs are all phonetic, only a small number—thirty-four in all—are alphabetic, the remainder representing syllables.