“The hieroglyphical text of the inscription of Rosetta,” he observes, (p. 6), “exhibited, on account of its fractures, only the name of Ptolemy. The obelisc found in the Isle of Philae, and lately removed to London, contains also the hieroglyphical name of one of the Ptolemies, expressed by the same characters that occur in the inscription of Rosetta, surrounded by a ring or border, and it is followed by a second border, which must necessarily contain the proper name of a woman, and of a queen of the family of the Lagidae, since this group is terminated by the hieroglyphics expressive of the feminine gender; characters which are found at the end of the names of all the Egyptian goddesses without exception. The obelisc was fixed, it is said, to a basis bearing a Greek inscription, which is a petition of the priests of Isis at Philae, addressed to King Ptolemy, to Cleopatra his sister, and to Cleopatra his wife. Now, if this obelisc, and the hieroglyphical inscription engraved on it, were the result of this petition, which in fact adverts to the consecration of a monument of the kind, the border, with the feminine proper name, can only be that of one of the Cleopatras. This name, and that of Ptolemy, which in the Greek have several letters in common, were capable of being employed for a comparison of the hieroglyphical characters composing them; and if the similar characters in these names expressed in both the same sounds, it followed that their nature must be entirely phonetic.”
This course of investigation appears, indeed, to be so simple and so natural, that the reader must naturally be inclined to forget that any preliminary steps were required: and to take it for granted, either that it had long been known and admitted, that the rings on the pillar of Rosetta contained the name of Ptolemy, and that the semicircle and the oval constituted the female termination, or that Mr. Champollion himself had been the author of these discoveries.
It had, however, been one of the greatest difficulties attending the translation of the hieroglyphics of Rosetta, to explain how the groups within the rings, which varied considerably in different parts of the pillar, and which occurred in several places where there was no corresponding name in the Greek, while they were not to be found in others where they ought to have appeared, could possibly represent the name of Ptolemy; and it was not without considerable labour that I had been able to overcome this difficulty. The interpretation of the female termination had never, I believe, been suspected by any but myself: nor had the name of a single god or goddess, out of more than five hundred that I have collected, been clearly pointed out by any person.
But, however Mr. Champollion may have arrived at his conclusions, I admit them, with the greatest pleasure and gratitude, not by any means as superseding my system, but as fully confirming and extending it. And here I am compelled to advert to a note of Mr. Champollion’s, which I fear will be thought to go a little beyond a tacit adoption of my opinions, and to approach very near to an unintentional misrepresentation. “It must, without doubt, (p. 15,) have been by the form of this symbol, which has some resemblance to the figure of a basket, that Dr. Young was led to recognise the name of Berenice in the border that actually contains it. But he was of opinion that the hieroglyphics constituting proper names were employed as expressing whole syllables, that they were therefore a sort of rebuses, and that the first character of the name of Berenice, for example, represented the syllable BIR, which means a basket in the Egyptian language. This mistaken supposition has vitiated, in great measure, the phonetic analysis which he has attempted of the names of Ptolemy and Berenice, in which, notwithstanding, he has recognised the phonetic values of four of the characters: these are the P, one of the forms of the T, one of the forms of the M, and the I; but the whole of his syllabic alphabet, established from these two names only, was completely inapplicable to the great number of proper names phonetically expressed on the various monuments of Egypt ... Encyclopaedia Britannica, Supplement, IV. Pt. i. Edinb. Dec. 1819.”
Now, if Mr. Champollion had attended to my expressions, he must have perceived that it was not by any resemblance of an imaginary nature that I was “led to recognise the name of Berenice;” but by external evidence only. “The appellation Soteres,” I have observed, Art. 57, “as a dual, is well marked in the inscription of Rosetta, and the character, thus determined, explains a long name in the temple at Edfou ... 58. The wife of Ptolemy Soter, and mother of Philadelphus, was Berenice, whose name is found on a ceiling at Karnak, in the phrase, “Ptolemy and ... Berenice, the saviour gods.” In this name we appear to have another specimen of syllabic and alphabetical writing combined, in a manner not extremely unlike the ludicrous mixtures of words and things with which children are sometimes amused; for however Warburton’s indignation might be excited by such a comparison, it is perfectly true that, occasionally, “the sublime differs from the ridiculous by a single step only.”... I have then proceeded to state, as conjectural inferences, the syllabic analogies: but instead of four letters which Mr. Champollion is pleased to allow me, I have marked, in a subsequent chapter of this Essay, nine, which I have actually specified in different parts of my paper in the Supplement: and to these he has certainly added three new ones; or four, if he chooses to reckon the E as a fourth. I allow that I suspected the B, the L, and the S, to be sometimes used syllabically: but the analogy of these characters with the enchorial alphabet was so well marked, that my attempt to refine upon it could not easily have embarrassed any one in making the application. Mr. Champollion has never been led, in any one instance, from the Egyptian name of an object, to infer the phonetic interpretation, that is, the alphabetical power of its symbol: but the letters having once been ascertained, he has ransacked his memory or his dictionary for some name that he thought capable of being applied to the symbol: and not always, as it appears to me, in the most natural manner: I should prefer, for instance, the word HRERI, a flower, as making the R, to the name of pomegranate, which, it seems, was sometimes called ROMAN or ERMAN. I must also observe that my intention, in placing the Coptic names in my vocabulary of hieroglyphics, was to assist in tracing any such analogies that might suggest themselves: and in the instance of AM or EM, N. 123, the reading approaches very near to one of the letters, added by Mr. Champollion to my alphabet.
With respect to the diversity of characters representing the same letter, it will be observed that I have marked three forms of the M, three of the N, with a fourth that was suggested to me by Mr. Bankes, two of the P or PH, and two of the S. Of these last, I cannot omit to observe, that Mr. Champollion has devoted at least a page of his letter (p. 13, 14) to the demonstration of the identity of these same forms: and that it would not have been unnatural to refer, in a single line of that page, to the assertion of the same identity, which I had made in the article Egypt, No. 102. “The bent line is often exchanged in the manuscripts for the divided staff, and both are represented in the running hand by a figure like a 9 or a 4.” The remainder of the forms, assigned to the letters, are all due to Mr. Champollion’s ingenious and successful investigations.
It so happens, that in the lithographical sketch of the obelisc of Philae, which had been put into my hands by its adventurous and liberal possessor, the artist has expressed the first letter of the name of Cleopatra by a T instead of a K, and as I had not leisure at the time to enter into a very minute comparison of the name with other authorities, I suffered myself to be discouraged with respect to the application of my alphabet to its analysis, and contented myself with observing, that if the steps of the formation of an alphabet were not exactly such as I had pointed out, they must at least have been very nearly of the same nature. In return, I was complimented for my candour, while I ought, perhaps, to have been reproved for my timidity. If, however, I may judge from my late correspondence with Mr. Champollion, he does not appear to be altogether so averse to the admission of syllabic characters on some occasions, as his note upon my “false point of departure” appears to imply: and I think he will find, in the evidence now first made public, respecting the enchorial character, some additional grounds for enforcing the opinion. I shall insert a specimen of one variety of each of the names which he has succeeded in deciphering: observing only, that his alphabet could scarcely have agreed so well with the various combinations of these names, as it appears to do, if it had not been in great measure correct: and that I also fully agree with Mr. Champollion in his interpretation of the phrase of the Pamfilian obelisc, which he translates, who has received the kingdom from Vespasian his father: the same phrase occurring on the pillar of Rosetta, as well as on the obelisc of Philae, where it had served to correct my later opinion respecting the symbol for FATHER. It is here evident that the expression cannot relate, as Mr. St. Martin imagines it must have done in the inscriptions of Rosetta, to the immediate installation of a son by the hands of his father; but that the right of inheritance only was implied by it. I am not however convinced, by the coherence of this passage, that the greater part of the obelisc was ever intended by the sculptor to convey a connected meaning; and at any rate the explanation confirms the opinion, that I had expressed, respecting the Roman origin of the workmanship. There are a few of the busts, now placed in the magical gallery of the Vatican, which appeared to me, on the contrary, to have been brought from Egypt with their genuine and ancient inscriptions, and to have had their features newly formed, and more highly polished, by Roman artists of the age of Adrian, in whose villa at Tivoli they were principally found.
Mr. Champollion has lately had the goodness to communicate to me, by letter, some suggestions, which, I conclude, he is on the point of making public, and I therefore take the liberty of mentioning them, as far as I think them at all admissible, though, perhaps, a little prematurely. He is disposed to refer the name, which I consider as that of the father of Amasis, to Sesostris, as synonymous with Ramesses, which he thinks the characters are probably intended to express phonetically. Now I readily allow, that where this name is written fully and accurately, as it is repeatedly found in Mr. Bankes’s great catalogue of Abydos, it may without much violence be read nearly as Mr. Champollion proposes, “the approved by Phthah, Ramesses,” or “the counterpart of Phthah, Ramesses;” the first part of the group undergoing several synonymous variations, while the end remains unchanged; although, if this reading were established, I should refer the first name to Amenophis or Memnon, who was the son of Ramesses, or of Armesses called Miamun; and to whom the tomb of my Amasis is said to be attributed in the Greek and Latin inscriptions which are found in it; who is also said to have built the palace of Abydos, on which my Amasis evidently appears as the founder; who is more easily understood than Amasis to be prior to the Psammetichus mentioned at Ebsambul; and, who is more likely than Amasis to have been at Berýtus, or Nahr el Kelb, where Mr. Wyse, as I am informed by Sir William Gell, has distinctly observed this name, accompanied by the nail-headed characters. All these reasons are more than sufficient to counterbalance the single assertion of Pliny; and we should be obliged to change my Psammis, according to his place in Mr. Bankes’s table of kings, into the Armais of Manetho; though the vocal Memnon of the numerous inscriptions would be converted by this comparison into Queen Rathotis, or we should be obliged to leave out three of Manetho’s list, to bring him up to the Amenophis who is called the Trojan Memnon by that author. All this is, indeed, a little alluring, and several suppositions might be introduced to overcome the difficulties: but unfortunately the fundamental supposition appears to be liable to an insurmountable objection; that the circle, which Mr. Champollion considers as equivalent to the RE or RA of Ramesses, is also the first character of each of the seventeen names immediately preceding it, and indeed of every other in the catalogue, that remains unmutilated at the beginning.
I am therefore sorry to say that I cannot hitherto congratulate Mr. Champollion on the success of his attempts to carry his system of phonetic characters into the very remotest antiquity of Egypt: he appears, however, to have a better prospect of elucidating some of the Persian names, having, as he informs me, been able to identify that of Xerxes, both in the hieroglyphics, and in the nail-headed characters, by means of a vase of alabaster, on which both are found together. This is, indeed, a wonderful opening for literary enterprise; and I am even inclined to hope, from Mr. Champollion’s latest communications, that he will find some means of overcoming the difficulties that I have stated respecting the Pharaohs, for he assures me, that he has identified the names of no less than THIRTY of them, and that they accord with the traditions of Manetho, and, as far as he can judge, with the notes that I had sent him of an attempt that I had formerly made to assign temporary names to the kings enumerated at Abydos, in which those of all the later ones began with the syllable RE. He will easily believe that I wish for a satisfactory answer to my own objections: and, in fact, the further that he advances by the exertion of his own talents and ingenuity, the more easily he will be able to admit, without any exorbitant sacrifice of his fame, the claim that I have advanced to a priority with respect to the first elements of all his researches; and I cannot help thinking that he will ultimately feel it most for his own substantial honour and reputation, to be more anxious to admit the just claims of others than they can be to advance them.