I am impatient to turn, from every thing of a polemical or personal nature, to a field that has hitherto been exclusively in my own possession, in consequence of an event, which is the most important, considered as a single occurrence, that has taken place since the commencement of my Egyptian researches. It was very soon after my return from France, that George Francis Grey, Esq. of University College, Oxford, having been at Naples upon his return from Egypt, was so good as to bring me a few lines from my old friend Sir William Gell, himself a very successful traveller, and who has always pursued with ardour the last vestiges of the interesting remains of antiquity, both by his personal exertions, and by assisting and directing the enterprises of others.
Mr. Grey had the kindness, on the 22d of November last, to leave with me a box, containing several fine specimens of writing and drawing on papyrus; they were chiefly in hieroglyphics, and of a mythological nature: but the two which he had before described to me, as particularly deserving attention, and which were brought, through his judicious precautions, in excellent preservation, both contained some Greek characters, written apparently in a pretty legible hand. He had purchased them of an Arab at Thebes, in January 1820; and that which was most intelligible had appeared, at first sight, to contain some words relating to the service of the Christian church. Mr. Grey was so good as to give me leave to make any use of these manuscripts that I pleased; and he readily consented to their insertion among the lithographic copies of the “Hieroglyphics, collected by the Egyptian Society,” which I had undertaken to superintend from time to time, in great measure for the private use of an association of my own friends, not sufficiently numerous to insure any permanent stability to its continuance.
Mr. Champollion had done me the favour, while I was at Paris, to copy for me some parts of the very important papyrus, which I have before mentioned as having given him the name of Cleopatra; and of which the discovery was certainly a great event in Egyptian literature, since it was the first time that any intelligible characters, of the enchorial form, had been discovered among the many manuscripts and inscriptions that had been examined, and since it furnished Mr. Champollion at the same time with a name, which materially advanced, if I understood him rightly, the steps that have led him to his very important extension of the hieroglyphical alphabet. He had mentioned to me, in conversation, the names of Apollonius, “Antiochus,” and Antigonus, as occurring among the witnesses; and I easily recognised the groups which he had deciphered: although, instead of Antiochus, I read Antimachus; and I did not recollect at the time that he had omitted the M.
In the evening of the day that Mr. Grey had brought me his manuscripts, I proceeded impatiently to examine that which was in Greek only: and I could scarcely believe that I was awake, and in my sober senses, when I observed, among the names of the witnesses, ANTIMACHUS ANTIGENIS: and, a few lines further back, PORTIS APOLLONII; although the last word could not have been very easily deciphered, without the assistance of the conjecture, which immediately occurred to me, that this manuscript might perhaps be a translation of the enchorial manuscript of Casati: I found that its beginning was, “A copy of an Egyptian writing ...;” and I proceeded to ascertain, that there were the same number of names, intervening between the Greek, and the Egyptian signatures, that I had identified, and that the same number followed the last of them; and the whole number of witnesses appeared to be sixteen in each. The last paragraph in the Greek began with the words, “Copy of the Registry;” for such must be the signification of the word ΠΤΩΜΑΤΟΣ, employed in this papyrus, though it does not appear to occur any where else in a similar signification. I could not, therefore, but conclude, that a most extraordinary chance had brought into my possession a document which was not very likely, in the first place, ever to have existed, still less to have been preserved uninjured, for my information, through a period of near two thousand years: but that this very extraordinary translation should have been brought safely to Europe, to England, and to me, at the very moment when it was most of all desirable to me to possess it, as the illustration of an original which I was then studying, but without any other reasonable hope of being able fully to comprehend it; this combination would, in other times, have been considered as affording ample evidence of my having become an Egyptian sorcerer.
Mr. Champollion had not thought it worth while to give me a transcript of the original Greek endorsement: he seemed to consider it as not fully agreeing with the Egyptian text, or, at any rate, as not materially assisting in its interpretation: perhaps, also, he thought it best for me to try my strength upon the original, without any little assistance that might have been derived from it with respect to two or three of the names: or, as I am more disposed to believe, he was fearful of offending some of his countrymen, by making too public what he had no right to communicate without their leave: for after an accidental delay of a month, the answer that I received from Paris was only such as to enable me to state, that my opinion of the identity of the two endorsements is fully confirmed. I have lost, however, no time in sending to the Conservators of the King’s cabinet a copy of my registry; with a request to be favoured with theirs in return, in order that I might have the same advantage from the comparison, which I voluntarily afforded the Parisian critics, without any reserve or delay; and in order that the duplicates may stand side by side in the lithographical copy, which has only waited for their answer, to have a vacant space filled up, and to be sent to them entire. In the mean time, I have only to wish, that the philologists of Paris may do as ample justice to these papyri, as one of the most distinguished of their number, Mr. Letronne, has lately done to the inscriptions of the Oasis, of which I had made a very hasty translation from a single copy only, not having had the means of comparing it properly with the second.
My application for the copy of the Registry has been received with the liberality which was to be expected from the directors of a great institution, and I have to return my best thanks to Mr. Raoul Rochette, for a correct copy of the whole of this highly important manuscript, which I am happy to find that it is his intention to publish in a short time. I am most anxious to avoid anticipating him, in the gratification of the public curiosity, with regard to this interesting relic: but as I find that some account of the Registry has already been made public by Mr. St. Martin, I conceive myself at liberty to make use, at least, of this part of the manuscript: and I do not imagine that Mr. Raoul Rochette means to employ himself on the enchorial conveyance.
The contents of Mr. Grey’s Greek manuscript are of a nature scarcely less remarkable than its preservation and discovery: it relates to the sale, not of a house or a field, but of a portion of the Collections and Offerings made from time to time on account, or for the benefit, of a certain number of Mummies, of persons described at length, in very bad Greek, with their children and all their households. The price is not very clearly expressed; but as the portion sold is only a moiety of a third part of the whole, and as the testimony of sixteen witnesses was thought necessary on the occasion, it is probable that the revenue, thus obtained by the priests, was by no means inconsiderable.
The result, derived at once from this comparison, is the identification of more than thirty proper names as they were written in the running hand of the country. It might appear, upon a superficial consideration, that a mere catalogue of proper names would be of little comparative value in assisting us to recover the lost elements of a language. But, in fact, they possess a considerable advantage, in the early stages of such an investigation, from the greater facility and certainty with which they are identified, and from their independence of any grammatical inflexions, at least in the present case; by means of which they lead us immediately to a full understanding of the orthographical system of the language, where any such system can be traced.
The general inference, to be derived from an examination of the names now discovered, is somewhat more in favour of an extensive employment of an alphabetical mode of writing, than any that could have been deduced from the pillar of Rosetta, which exhibits, indeed, only foreign names, and affords us therefore little or no information respecting the mode of writing the original Egyptian names of the inhabitants. Several of the words, which occur in these documents, and more especially in those which are hereafter to be mentioned, might be read pretty correctly, by means of the alphabet originally made out by Mr. Akerblad from the foreign names of the enchorial inscription; but there are many more which appear to be rather syllabically than alphabetically constituted: and the names of the different deities seem to be very commonly employed in writing them; for instance, those of Horus, Ammon, and Isis; and perhaps in the same way that they are often composed, in the mythological manuscripts, found with the mummies: in which, for want of the occurrence of a ring or border, or of the corresponding enchorial marks, I had concluded that the groups could not be intended to represent the ordinary names of the individuals. But these marks are, in fact, by no means constantly employed in the enchorial papyri; and they seem only to have been inserted when either great precision, or some distinguished mark of respect was required.
Important, however, as are the additions that are likely to be made to our knowledge by means of this “Antigraph”, it is by no means the only valuable acquisition for which we are indebted to the enterprise and the diligence of Mr. Grey: a second papyrus, of considerably greater magnitude, contains three Egyptian conveyances in the enchorial character, with separate registries on the margin, in very legible Greek. These are not only of use for the illustration of other similar documents, but they afford us also many additional examples of enchorial proper names, besides a general idea of the subjects of the respective manuscripts, all of which relate to the sale of lands in the neighbourhood of Thebes. It will be most convenient to consider them as parts of a series, of which those are the first to be examined, that are the most capable of affording an independent testimony; beginning with the Greek papyrus in the possession of Mr. Anastasy, the Swedish consul at Alexandria, and proceeding to the Antigraph and its original, and thence to the three enchorial manuscripts, which are also the property of Mr. Grey. It is scarcely conceivable, by a person who has not made the experiment; how much the difficulty of reading a depraved character is almost universally diminished by the comparison of two or three copies of the same or of similar passages; the words, which would be wholly unintelligible in either taken singly, being often very easily legible when both are at once under the eye; and, still more commonly, a word which is confused or contracted in one, being written clearly or at length in another.