In addition to this apology, perhaps already too long, I will venture to state, as a matter of anecdote, the train of occurrences that has accidentally led me to engage in these pursuits. To begin therefore with the beginning, or rather before the beginning, as the subject of a preface may very naturally do: I had been induced by motives both of private friendship, and of professional obligation, to offer, to the editors of a periodical publication, an article, which I thought would be of some advantage to their collection, containing an abstract of Adelung’s Mithridates, a work then lately received from the continent. In reading this elaborate compilation, my curiosity was excited by a note of the editor, Professor Vater, in which he asserted that the unknown language of the Stone of Rosetta, and of the bandages often found with the mummies, was capable of being analysed into an alphabet consisting of little more than thirty letters: but having merely retained this general impression, I thought no more of these inscriptions, until they were recalled to my attention, by the examination of some fragments of a papyrus, which had been brought home from Egypt by my friend Sir William Rouse Boughton, then lately returned from his travels in the East. With this accidental occurrence my Egyptian researches began: their progress and termination will be the subject of the present volume. T. Y. _Welbeck Street, 1 March, 1823._ WORKS OF THE AUTHOR; TO BE HAD OF THE PUBLISHER. 1. A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts, 2 vols. 4to. 1807. 2. An Introduction to Medical Literature, including a System of Practical Nosology, 8vo. Second edition, 1823. 3. A Practical and Historical Treatise on Consumptive Diseases, 8vo. 1815. 4. Elementary Illustrations of the Celestial Mechanics of Laplace, 8vo. 1821. DISCOVERIES IN HIEROGLYPHICAL LITERATURE. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY SKETCH OF THE PREVALENT OPINIONS RESPECTING HIEROGLYPHICS.