TABLET OF SNEFURA AT WADY MAGERAH.
(The oldest inscription in the world, probably 6000 years old. The king conquering an Arabian or Asiatic enemy.)
This name reads "Snefura," which is the name of the king of the third dynasty who reigned about 4000 b.c., or before the building of the Great Pyramids, which inscription is the earliest contemporary one of an Egyptian king as yet discovered. It was found at the copper mines of Wady Magerah, in the peninsula of Sinai, and represents the victory of the king over an Arabian or Asiatic enemy.
The first step towards the decipherment of the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone was made in 1819 by Dr. Young, who was one of the most ingenious and original thinkers of the nineteenth century, and is also famous as the first discoverer of the undulatory theory of light. But in both cases he merely indicated the right path and laid down the correct principles. The development of his theories was reserved for two Frenchmen; Fresnel in the case of Light, and Champollion in that of Hieroglyphics. The task was one which required immense patience and ingenuity, for the hieroglyphic alphabet turned out to be one of great complexity. Not only were many of the signs not phonetic, but ideographic or determinative; and some of them standing for syllables and not letters; but the letters themselves were not represented, as in modern languages, each by a single sign or at most by two signs, as A and a, but by several different signs. The Egyptian alphabet was in fact constructed very much as young children often learn theirs, by—
- A was an apple-pie,
- B bit it,
- C cut it;
with this difference, that several objects, whose names begin with A and other letters, might be used to represent them. Thus some of the hieroglyphic letters had as many as twenty-five different signs or homophones. It is as if we could write for 'a,' the picture either of an apple, or of an ass, archer, arrow, anchor, or any word beginning with 'a.'
However, Champollion with infinite difficulty, and aided by the constant discovery of fresh inscriptions, solved the problem, and succeeded in producing a complete alphabet of hieroglyphics comprising all the various signs, thus enabling us to translate every hieroglyphic sign into its corresponding sound or spoken word.
The next question was, what did these words mean, and could they be recognized in any known language? The answer to this was easy; the Egyptians spoke Egyptic, or as it is abbreviated Coptic, a modern form of which is almost a living language, and is preserved in translations of the Bible still in use and studied by the aid of Coptic dictionaries and grammars. This enabled Champollion to construct a hieroglyphic dictionary and grammar, which have been so completed by the labours of subsequent Egyptologists, that it is not too much to say that any inscription or manuscript in hieroglyphics can be read with nearly as much certainty as if it had been written in Greek or in Hebrew.
