presented, if the extraordinary condescension of his Serene Highness had not made it his duty to acknowledge his respectful sense of that condescension by such an offering to it as alone was in his power.

He would have presented himself personally according to his Serene Highness's gracious permission, signified to him through his friend Sir John Hippisley, to pay the homage which every one owes to the rank and virtues of the Prince of Wurtemberg, but he did not choose to affect his compassion by exhibiting to his Serene Highness the remains of an object worn out by age, grief, and infirmity, and condemned to perpetual retreat.

The Authour is convinced that the favourable sentiments of the Prince with regard to those letters, are not owing to the talents of the writer, but to the cause which he has undertaken, however weakly, to defend, and of which his Serene Highness is the protector by situation and by disposition.

The Authour hopes that if it should please God by his all-powerful interposition to preserve the ruins of the civilized world, his Serene Highness will become a great instrument in its necessary repa ration, and that not only in the noble estates which comprize his own patrimony, but in the two great empires in which he has so natural and just an influence, as well as in the third which his Serene High ness is going to unite in interest and affection with the other two. In this he will co-operate with the beneficial and enlarged views of the illustrious house, and its virtuous chief, who are on the point of having the happiness of his alliance. To the complete success of that alliance publick and domestick, some of the Authour's latest and most ardent vows will be directed!

In the great task allotted to the sovereigns who shall remain, his Serene Highness will find it necessary to exercise, in his own terris tories, and also to recommend, wherever his influence shall reach, a judicious, well-tempered, and manly severity in the support of law, order, religion, and morals; and this will be as expedient for the happiness of the people, as it will be to follow the natural bent of his own good heart, in procuring by more pleasant modes the good of the subject, who stands everywhere in need of a firm and vigorous, full as much as of a lenient and healing government.

With sentiments of the most profound respect,

His Serene Highness's most faithful and obliged Servant, 'Bath, 28th of April 1797. Edmund Burke.'

Art. III. Précis du Système Hieroglyphique des Anciens Egyptiens; ou Recherches sur les Elémens Premiers de cette Ecriture sacrée, sur leurs diverses Combinaisons, et sur les Rapports de ce Systême avec les Autres Méthodes Graphiques Egyptiennes. Par M. Champollion le Jeune. Avec un Volume de Planches. roy. 8vo. pp. 410 & 46. Paris. 1824.

THE design of this work, the learned and indefatigable Author tells us, is to demonstrate the universality of the phonetic

use of his alphabet; and that of his eighth chapter is, to apply it to the proper names of the Pharaohs anterior to Cambyses. When we opened upon this passage (p. 177), it struck us that this was assuredly a usgov gotov with a witness-a putting first of what ought to have come last; for it is impossible for M. Champollion to demonstrate the universality of his alphabet, without having previously applied it to the proper names of the Pharaohs. Anxious to see how he works the machinery of his alphabet in this respect, we turned to cartouche 109, the first on the list of the proper names of the Pharoah dynasty. Here, the first thing which we encounter, is a groupe of four characters;-a plant and a semi-circle, a bee and a semi-circle, of which M. Champollion offers the following explanation.

The first inscription is preceded by the groupe which, in the hieroglyphic inscription of the Rosetta stone, always corresponds to the word BAZIAEYE of the Greek text. The two first characters of this groupe, the plant (S) and the segment of a sphere (T), are, in fact, the two first signs of the groupe (No. 270 in the plates) souten, rex, director, which, in the hieroglyphic inscriptions, expresses very frequently the same idea, king, and the hieratic form of which is easily recognised in the corresponding groupe of the demotic inscription of Rosetta. The third sign of the groupe is a bee, joined to the segment of a sphere; the usual sign of the feminine gender in the Egyptian language, in which the word bee is, in fact, of that gender. If we may depend on the formal testimony of Horapollo, the bee expresses, in hieroglyphic writing, Λαον προς Βασιλέα πειθήνιον, a people obedient to their king. We may therefore consider the four characters which compose the groupe (No. 270 b) as an established formula, signifying the director, or king of the obedient people, and as formed of an abbreviation of the phonetic groupe signifying king, and of a character purely symbolical,-the bee; the industrious insect to whom a laborious life, directed by an admirable instinct, gives an appearance of civilization which entitles it, in fact, to be considered as the most striking emblem of a people submissive to a fixed social order and a regular power. Further, this title is sometimes replaced or followed, on the first cartouche, by that of master of the world, lord of the world.' pp. 184, 5.

Διπλουν ὅρωσιν ὅι μαθοντες γραμματα-Learners see double. To some such illusion we must ascribe M. Champollion's symbolical bee. There is no reason whatever for regarding this groupe as symbolical, but his being ignorant of the phonetic value of the hieroglyphic bee. The learned Egyptian is clearly at fault; he feels it, yet refuses to confess it. We are far from meaning to insinuate that he intends to impose on his readers by attempting this explanation of what, in the present state of our knowledge, cannot be deciphered; but he has

evidently imposed on himself. Three of the above-mentioned characters are known to be alphabetic. There is the plant S, and the semi-circle or hemisphere T; then comes the bee, the phonetic value of which is not known, and which ought, accordingly, to have been set down as a desideratum to be supplied by future discoveries. But no; the bee must be symbolical, and the whole, an established formula! After the bee, however, comes the semi-circle again, the alphabetic yalue of which has been ascertained to be T; yet this, too, must now be symbolical. Nothing can surely be more unreasonable, than to suppose that the semi-circle was introduced here merely to mark the gender of the Coptic word for bee, when, if the bee were symbolical, as M. Champollion contends, the Coptic word would have nothing to do with it. The object of the writer could not have been, to designate the gen der of the Coptic word for bee, but the gender of the object which the symbol represented. Even Dr. Young admits, that the oval and the semi-circle attached to the name of Isis, are not in tended to mark the gender of the Coptic word for throne, but the gender of the divinity seated on it. Surely, it is enough to assign genders to words, without giving genders to letters.

We now come to the cartouche itself, which, according to M. Champollion's alphabet, should be read R. R. K. I. I. I. But of this nothing can be made; the learned Author wisely, therefore, calls it le prénom, the royal legend, and abandons it with the simple intimation, that the first cartouche never contains any thing but honorary titles, such as emperor, sovereign, &c. Over the second cartouche is a goose with a circle on its back, which M. Champollion interprets Son of Phre, (i. e. of the Sun,) and says, that they do not connect, as was imagined, the names of father and son, but the hono rary title (such as aurexgarwę, with which is sometimes joined Son of the Sun') and the real name. In the second cartouche, he reads the letters A. M. N. F., which he interprets, Amenophis the First, the third king of the eighteenth dynasty' (of Manetho), A. C. 1614. The fourth letter, F., is not, however, in M. Champollion's alphabet, and is as likely. to be M. as F.; on which supposition, the whole would read, Beloved of Ammon,' and there would be no proper name at all in the cartouche, which he affirms always to contain the proper name.* Two characters in the cartouche, however,

M. Champollion maintains, however, that Amenof (the Greek Memnon) is but an abbreviation of Amenofter, celui qu' Ammon a goûté.

still remain undeciphered, and these M. C. leaves in the present instance unnoticed. They occur again in cartouche No. 111, and then, although the learned Author has not assigned, and, as far as we are aware, cannot assign, any reason why these two characters are not to be regarded as part of the proper name, he reads the four letters A. M. N. F., and calls the remaining two un titre honorifique which is not less absurd than it would be to read his name Cham, and call pollion a title of honour. Thus, out of thirty-one characters of which these two cartouches consist, M. C. has read only ten, and yet, he pretends to have expounded the whole. Of the groupe No. 110, he knows only two letters in the second cartouche, which he reads MeS, and translates son; yet, connecting it with the symbol' by which it is surmounted, and which is affirmed to be the symbolic proper name of the god Thoth or Thôout, he explains the whole to be Touthmosis, seventh king of the "eighteenth dynasty.' But what is this achievement, in which he had two letters to work with, compared to the ingenuity exercised upon cartouche No. 120, in which M. C. knows not one letter of the name, and yet reads Psammus, third king ' of the twenty-third dynasty? Quid subtilius aut magis tenue quam quod nihil est? We must give his own explanation.

This proper name, as it can be expressed by a single sign, is certainly not phonetic; it must therefore be symbolic, and we have only to ascertain the symbolic value of this same sign,-the anterior parts of a lion. The inestimable work of Horapollo fully satisfies us on this point. He states, that the Egyptians, wishing to express strength (Any de yeaPortes), represented the anterior parts of a lion. And the word in the language spoken by the Egyptians, which specifically expresses this idea, aλn, robur, is djom, sjom, or sjam, accord ing to the dialects, the word which is also the true Egyptian orthography of the name of the Egyptian Hercules, which the Greeks wrote Es, Eques, and Couos. Now, the king whom Manetho makes the immediate successor of the king Osorthos (Osortasen), is YAMMOTE; a proper name in which we cannot mistake the same root, formed into a noun by the addition of the determinate masculine article, which has produced Psjom, Pdjom, Psjam, THE MIGHTY ONE, or more simply, (the Egyptian) HERCULES. pp. 200, 1.

But M. Champollion is so carried away by his lion, that he leaves two letters in this cartouche unexplained. These, if read by his alphabet, are T and A, or R.; so that, if the lion's head and shoulders be djom, the name must be Djomta or Djomter! Give an antiquary an inch, and he will take a yard. We thought we had conceded enough, when we allowed ourselves to be persuaded that Tomtens meant Domitian, and Krmnks Ger

manicus*. We were next required to allow Ptahf to be Ptahaftep and Petoubastes, and Sam Tig to be Psammiticus. But to admit Djomter to be first of all cut down to Pidjom, and then transformed into Psammus, is really more than we can conscientiously grant even to M. Champollion. From w to King Pepin were, after this, but an easy leap. And why are we called upon to do this? Merely because M. Champollion does not know the alphabetic value of a lion's head and shoulders, and will not confess his ignorance!

The fact seems to be, that the view which he had taken of Hieroglyphics, is too simple, not only for general satisfaction, but for his own. The public seem to expect something occult in hieroglyphics,-something great, that shall compensate for the gaping amazement with which, for three thousand years, they have been ignorantly stared at. They will not be brought to believe, that a lion is but an L., a sibilant goose but an S.; that Dr. Young's favourite semi-circle is but a T, Jupiter Ammon but a B, and the great Apis himself, θεος εν Αιγυπίοις ἔνεργειαίος, a mere round O helping to spell the name of his greatest enemy. M. Champollion, alarmed for his symbols, recoiling at the havoc which himself hath made, looks round in his exigency for the aid of Horapollo; and no sooner, in the present instance, does he gain sight of the symbolic lion's than up he springs,-adieu, frére Jean, le texte est formel, and off he gallops, like Munchausen on the forepart of his charger, reckless of all behind. He beats a similar retreat, in another instance, (No. 105,) on the lion's other half- les par'ties postérieures d'un lion.'

go,

In cartouche No. 113, the Author shews us the name of Ramses Meiamoun, but he leaves three characters unexplained, which might make it any thing else. He deserves our best thanks, however, for shewing us, in the next cartouche, the name of Ramses the Great, first king of the nineteenth dy'nasty,' better known under the name of Sesostris; the lid. of whose sarcophagus, adorned with his effigy and that of two of his wives, was brought from the Harp tomb in Thebes, and is now at Cambridge. The name of Ramses is much better made out in this cartouche, than any of the others in the whole list of the Pharaohs. The letters are RAMSS. M. C. shews us the same name on the columns at Karnac, and that of Ramses Meiamoun is seen where the monarch is reposing on his chariot to witness the spectacle of the mutilation of the captives, on the walls of Medinat Abou.

* Eclectic Review. Dec. 1823. (Vol. XX.) p. 492.