Diodorus gives us very much the same narratives as those of Herodotus; and, on the whole, we had to fall back on Manetho as the only authority for anything like precise dates and connected history.
Manetho's dates, however, were so inconsistent with preconceived ideas based on the chronology of the Bible, that they were universally thought to be fabulous. They were believed either to represent the exaggerations of Egyptian priests desirous of magnifying the antiquity of their country, or, if historical, to give in succession the names of a number of kings and dynasties who had really reigned simultaneously in different provinces. So stood the question until the discovery of reading hieroglyphics enabled us to test the accuracy of Manetho's lists by the light of contemporary monuments and manuscripts. This discovery is of such supreme importance that it may be well to begin at the beginning, and lay a solid foundation by showing how it was made, and the demonstration on which it rests.
Reading presupposes writing, as writing presupposes speech. Ideas are conveyed from one mind to another in speech through the ear, in writing through the eye. The origin of the latter method is doubtless to be found in picture-writing. The palæolithic savage who drew a mammoth with the point of a flint on a piece of ivory, was attempting to write, in his rude way, a record of some memorable chase. And the accounts of the old Empires of Mexico and Peru at the time of the Spanish Conquest, show that a considerable amount of civilization can be attained and information conveyed by this primitive method. But for the purpose of historical record more is required. It is essential to have a system of signs and symbols which shall be generally understood, and by which knowledge shall be handed down unchanged to successive generations. All experience shows that before knowledge is thus fixed and recorded, anything that may be transmitted by memory and word of mouth, fades off almost immediately into myth, and leaves no certain record of time, place, and circumstance. A few religious hymns and prayers like those of the Vedas, a few heroic ballads like those of Homer, a few genealogies like those of Agamemnon or Abraham, may be thus preserved, but nothing definite or accurate in the way of fact and date. History, therefore, begins with writing, and writing begins with the invention of fixed signs to represent words. A system of writing is possible, like the Chinese, in which each separate word has its own separate sign, but this is extremely cumbrous, and quite unintelligible to those who have not got a living key to explain the meaning of each symbol. It is calculated that an educated Chinese has to learn by heart the meaning of some 15,000 separate signs before he can read and write correctly. We have a trace of this ideographic system in our own language, as where arbitrary signs such as 1, 2, 3, represent not the sounds of one, two, and three, but the ideas conveyed by them. But for all practical purposes, intelligible writing has to be phonetic, that is, representing spoken words, not by the ideas they convey, but by the sounds of which they are composed. In other words there must be an Alphabet.
The alphabet is the first lesson of childhood, and it seems such a simple thing that we are apt to forget that it is one of the most important and original inventions of the human intellect. Some prehistoric genius, musing on the meaning of spoken words, has seen that they might all be analyzed into a few simple sounds. To make this more easily intelligible, I will suppose the illustrations to be taken from our own language. "Dog" and "dig" express very different ideas; but a little reflection will show that the primary sounds made by the tongue, teeth, and palate, viz. 'd' and 'g,' are the same in each, and that they differ only by a slight variation in the soft breathing or vowel, which connects them and renders them vocal. The next step would be to see that such words as "good" or "God," consisted of the same root-sounds, only transposed and connected with a slight vowel difference. Pursuing the analysis, it would finally be discovered that the many thousand words of spoken language could all be resolved into a very small number of radical sounds, each of which might be represented and suggested to the mind through the eye instead of the ear by some conventional sign or symbol. Here is the alphabet, and here the art of writing.
This great achievement of the human intellect appears to have been made in prehistoric times; and where not obviously imported from a foreign source, as in the Phœnician alphabet from the Egyptian and the Greek from the Phœnician, it is attributed to some god, that is, to an unknown antiquity.
Thus in Egypt, Thoth the Second, known to the Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus, a fabulous demi-god of the period succeeding the reign of the great gods, is said to have invented the alphabet and the art of writing. The analysis of primary sounds varies a little in different times and countries in order to suit peculiarities in the pronunciation of different races and convenience in writing; but about sixteen primitive sounds, which is the number of the letters of the first alphabet brought by Cadmus to Greece, are always its basis. In our own alphabet it is easy to see that it is not formed on strictly scientific principles, some of the letters being redundant. Thus the soft sound of 'c' is expressed by 's,' and the hard sound by 'k'; and 'x' is an abbreviation of three other letters, 'eks.' Some letters also express sounds which run so closely into one another that in some alphabets they are not distinguished, as 'f' and 'v,' 'd' and 't', 'l' and 'r'; while some races have guttural and other sounds, such as 'kh' and 'sj,' which occur so frequently as to require separate signs, while they baffle the vocal organs of other races, and in some cases syllables which frequently occur, instead of being spelt out alphabetically, are represented by single signs. But these are mere details, the question substantially is this—if a collection of unknown signs is phonetic, and we can get any clue to its alphabet, it can be read; if not it must remain a sealed book.
To apply this to hieroglyphics; it had been long known that the monuments of ancient Egypt were carved with mysterious figures, representing commonly birds, animals, and other natural objects, but all clue to their meaning had been lost. It seemed more natural to suppose that they were ideographic; that a lion for instance represented a real lion, or some quality associated with him, such as fierceness, valour, and kingly aspect, rather than that his picture stood simply for our letter 'l.' The long-desired clue was afforded by the famous Rosetta stone. This is a mutilated block of black basalt, which was discovered in 1799 by an engineer officer of the French expedition, in digging the foundations of a fort near Rosetta. It was captured, with other trophies, by the British army, when the French were driven out of Egypt, and is now lodged at the British Museum. It bears on it three inscriptions, one in hieroglyphics, the second in the demotic Egyptian character employed for popular use, and the third in Greek. The Greek can of course be read, and it is an inscription commemorating the coronation of Ptolemy Epiphanes and his Queen Arsinoe, in the year 196 b.c. It was an obvious conjecture that the two Egyptian inscriptions were to the same effect, and that the Greek was a literal translation of this. To turn this conjecture, however, into a demonstration, a great deal of ingenuity and patient research were required. The principle upon which all interpretation of unknown signs rests may be most easily understood by taking an illustration from our own language. The first step in the problem is to know whether these unknown signs are ideographic or phonetic. Thus if we have two groups of signs, one of which we have reason to know stands for "Ptolemy" and the other for "Cleopatra," if they are phonetic, the first sign in Ptolemy will correspond with the fifth in Cleopatra; the second with the seventh, the third with the fourth, the fourth with the second, and the fifth with the third; and we shall have established five letters of the unknown alphabet, 'p, t, o, l,' and 'e.' Other names will give other letters, as if we know "Arsinoe," its comparison with "Cleopatra" will give 'a' and 'r,' and confirm the former induction as to 'o' and 'e.'
And it will be extremely probable that the two last signs in Ptolemy represent 'm' and 'y'; the first in Cleopatra 'c'; and the third, fourth, and fifth in Arsinoe, 's, i,' and 'n.' Suppose now that we find in an inscription on an ancient temple at Thebes, a name which begins with our known sign for 'r,' followed by our known 'a,' then by our conjectural 'm,' then by the sign which we find third in Arsinoe, or 's,' then by our known 'e,' and ending with a repetition of 's,' we have no difficulty in reading "Ramses," and identifying it with one of the kings of that name mentioned by Manetho as reigning at Thebes. The identification of letters was facilitated by the custom of inclosing the names of kings in what is called a cartouche or oval.
