representing either syllables (and these are so varied as to offer sometimes serious difficulties) or the letters of an only moderately complicated alphabet. These letters are also pictures of objects, but of objects or animals whose Egyptian name commenced with the letter in question, while also the syllabic characters (true rebusses) represented objects designated by that syllable." _F. Lenormant and E. Chevallier. Manual of the Ancient History of the East, book 3, chapter 5 (volume 1)._ "The system of writing employed by the people called Egyptians was probably entirely pictorial either at the time when they first arrived in Egypt, or during the time that they still lived in their original home. We, however, know of no inscription in which pictorial characters alone are used, for the earliest specimens of their writing known to us contain alphabetical characters. The Egyptians had three kinds of writing—Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic. … Hieroglyphics … were commonly employed for inscriptions upon temples, tombs, coffins, statues, and stelæ, and many copies of the Book of the Dead were written in them. The earliest hieroglyphic inscription at present known is found on the monument of Shera, parts of which are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and in the Gîzeh Museum; it dates from the IInd dynasty. Hieroglyphics were used in Egypt for writing the names of Roman Emperors and for religious purposes until the third century after Christ, at least. {1646} Hieratic … was a style of cursive writing much used by the priests in copying literary compositions on papyrus; during the XIth or XIIth dynasty wooden coffins were inscribed in hieratic with religious texts. The oldest document in hieratic is the famous Prisse papyrus, which records the counsels of Ptah-hetep to his son; the composition itself is about a thousand years older than this papyrus, which was probably inscribed about the XIth dynasty. Drafts of inscriptions were written upon flakes of calcareous stone in hieratic, and at a comparatively early date hieratic was used in writing copies of the Book of the Dead. Hieratic was used until about the fourth century after Christ. Demotic … is a purely conventional modification of hieratic characters, which preserve little of their original form, and was used for social and business purposes; in the early days of Egyptian decipherment it was called enchorial. … The Demotic writing appears to have come into use about B. C. 900, and it survived until about the fourth century after Christ. In the time of the Ptolemies three kinds of writing were inscribed side by side upon documents of public importance, hieroglyphic, Greek, and Demotic; examples are the stele of Canopus, set up in the ninth year of the reign of Ptolemy III. Euergetes I., B. C.