The earliest history of the Egyptians, like that of all other nations, was traditional. They adopted, however, before any other nations, a sort of writing, hieroglyphics, or allegorical picture writing; in which the signs borrowed from natural objects served, as modern discoveries have proved, partly to represent sounds, (_hieroglyphes phonetiques_,) and partly to express ideas; in the latter case they were either representative or allegorical. This mode of writing, by its nature, is not so complete as the purely alphabetical; since, 1. It can express only a narrow circle of ideas, and these separately, without connection or grammatical inflection, at least with very few exceptions. 2. As it is not so well adapted to writing as to painting or engraving, it is not so useful for books as for public monuments. 3. Being emblematic, it is not intelligible without the help of a key, which could only be preserved in some tradition connected with the monument, and which was exclusively possessed by the priests; this key, therefore, could hardly be preserved many centuries without falsification. 4. The same image seems frequently to have been used to express very different objects.--It follows, that the Egyptian history, as deduced from the lips of the priests, can hardly have been any thing more than records connected with, and depending upon, public monuments: consisting, therefore, of mere fragments, and reducible to no consistent chronology, it ultimately admitted only of allegorical translation, and consequently was very liable to be misinterpreted. Besides their hieroglyphics, the Egyptians certainly had two other species of writing: the _hieratic_, confined to the priests, and the _demotic_, used in common life. Both, however, seem to have been nothing more than running hands derived from the hieroglyphic system; and we have no instance of the employment of either the one or the other in public monuments of the time of the Pharaohs. That the use of papyrus, a material on which all the above kinds of writing were employed, had its origin in the highest antiquity, or at least in the more brilliant period of the Pharaohs, we now know for certain, written documents belonging to those times having been obtained from the tombs. CHAMPOLLION LE JEUNE, _Precis du Systeme Hieroglyphique des anciens Egyptiens_. Paris, 1824. The main work on this subject, of which the _Lettre a M. Dacier_, 1822, is but the precursor, and the two _Lettres a M. le duc de Blacas_ the continuation. The new method of deciphering has received its principal confirmation from the work of the British consul in Egypt, SALT, _Essay on the Phonetic System of Hieroglyphics_, 1825, on the authority of a comparison with the Egyptian monuments themselves. Hitherto, however, little more has been made out than the names and titles of the kings, distinguished by being always enclosed within a border.