The Egyptians, we know, employed a double character in expressing themselves[83], the _sacred_ and the _vulgar_: the first was what is called hieroglyphick; the other contained the characters of their national language, and this is commonly said to be lost. All we know is confined to the twenty-five letters of their alphabet.[84] Della Valle seems inclined to give an instance of the contrary, in that inscription; which Kircher, pushing his conjectures still farther, endeavours to lay down as a foundation for a new scheme of his; and to support it by two other remains of the same kind. For, he attempts to prove[85], that the dialect was the only difference between the old Egyptian and Greek tongue. According to his talent of finding what no body looks for, he makes free with some ancient historical accounts; upon which he obtrudes a fictitious sense, in order to make them tally with his scheme. Herodotus, according to him, tells us, that King Psammetichus desired some Greeks, who were perfect masters of their language, to go over to Egypt, in order to instruct his people in the purity of the tongue. Hence he concludes, that there was but one language in both countries. But that Greek historian[86] gives an account entirely opposite: he tells us, that Psammetichus, having received some services from the Carians and Ionians, permitted them to settle in Egypt, for the instruction of youth in the Greek language, in order to bring up interpreters. There is no solidity in the rest of the Kircherian arguments; such as those deduced from the frequent voyages of the Greek sages into Egypt, and the mutual commerce between the two nations; which have not even the strength of conjectures. For the very skill of Democritus, in the sacred tongue of the Babylonians and Egyptians[87], proves only, that the travelling sages learned the languages of the nations they conversed with. Nor does the testimony of Diodorus, that Attica was originally an Egyptian colony[88], seem to be here of any weight. The inscription of the Mummy might indeed admit of Kircherian, or such like conjectures, were the Mummy itself of the antiquity pretended by Kircher. Cambyses, the conqueror of Egypt, partly exiled, and partly killed the priests; from which fact Kircher confidently deduces as consequences, the total abolition of the sacred rites, and from that the ceasing to embalm bodies. He again appeals to a passage of Herodotus[89], which, upon his word alone, others have as confidently quoted. Nay, a certain pedant went so far as to pretend, that the Egyptian custom of painting their dead, upon the varnished linnen of the Mummies, ceased with the epoch of Cyrus[90].