The demotic text has never yet been fully translated. This writing is a cursive script, developed from the hieratic to express the vulgar dialect spoken by the people. As hieratic bears the same relation to hieroglyphic that ordinary writing does to printing, so the demotic, which is a further abridgment of the hieratic, is compared to the latter as bearing the same relation which short-hand does to writing. Some of these latent signs have been identified, but not all. The first five lines of a Papyrus (containing 75 lines), being the beginning of an ancient hymn addressed to the Deity, are added in the original Hieratic, with the transcription in Hieroglyphic characters. The Hieratic is read from right to left, the Hieroglyphic from left to right. The dots in the middle or end of the lines, written in red ink in the original manuscript, indicate that this is a poetic composition. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: HIERATIC AND HIEROGLYPHIC WRITINGS.] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----- Footnote 1: Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt. Vol. II. P. 47. CHAPTER II. THE other event referred to, which was to open to scholars another field of research, in interest and importance equal to the Egyptian discoveries, was the work of Grotefend, early in the century, in the decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions. In many parts of Persia, there are to be found engraved upon the native rocks, or upon ruined temples, inscriptions in peculiar characters. These characters are called cuneiform, because they are made up from combinations of a single sign resembling the head of an arrow or a thin wedge. This sign was formed in three ways, either horizontal, [—]; vertical, [|]; or angular, [<]. From these primary signs, a great variety of combinations appear, either in groups or forming single characters. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, fragments of these inscriptions, and copies of others, had found their way to Europe and into the hands of scholars. Although some of the most powerful intellects of Europe had attempted their interpretation, but little, if any progress had been made until the beginning of the past century. In the year 1802, Grotefend, then a young student in the University of Bonn, announced to his colleagues his success in the decipherment of a trilingual inscription copied by Niebuhr from the ruins of a royal palace at Persepolis. It will be remembered that this young scholar had no Rosetta Stone, with an inscription in a known language to indicate either subject or language; simply the strange combinations of these singular signs.