The germ of Champollion's discovery consisted in the bringing together of two sets of characters enclosed in cartouches. One of them is in the Rosetta inscription itself; the other, on the plinth of an obelisk in the island of Philæ. The name of Cleopatra was associated with the one inscription, and that of Ptolemy with the other. It was clear that if the two names, written [Hieroglyphs] and [Hieroglyphs], were really Ptolemaios and Cleopatra, they must include several identical signs or letters; in Ptolemaios the quadrangular figure [Hieroglyphs], being the first, must stand for _P_, and this in Cleopatra was found to occur in the right place, standing fifth in order. The third sign [Hieroglyphs] in Ptolemaios must be an _o_, and the fourth [Hieroglyphs] an _l_. Now the lion for _l_ occurs second in Cleopatra, and the knotted cord for _o_ fourth. In this way, proceeding by comparison with other names, that of Alexander, or Alksantrs, was next discovered, [Hieroglyphs] and by degrees the whole Egyptian alphabet was recovered. What had come down the stream of ages and were universally recognised as unsurpassed memorials of a mysterious past were the famous pyramids, successively described by Herodotus, Diodorus and Pliny among classical, and Abd el-Latîf among Arabian, chroniclers. Although the rifling of the most important of these structures for the purpose of finding treasure dates at least as far back as 820 A.D., the Khalîf El-Mamun being the destroyer, the scientific study of their mode and objects of construction is a work of quite modern times, and may be said to have been inaugurated by Colonel Howard Vyse in 1839. Much that has been written has been wild and nonsensical, but from the exact descriptions and measures now available, it is impossible to doubt that these structures _were erected by a people possessing much astronomical knowledge_. The exact orientation of the larger pyramids in the pyramid-field of Gîzeh has been completely established, and it is not impossible that some of the mysterious passages to be found in the pyramid of Cheops may have had an astronomical use. Let us, to continue the subject-matter of the present chapter, come to the year 1820. It was about then that were gathered some of the first-fruits of the investigations carried on by the Commission to which I have referred; that some translations of the inscriptions had been attempted, and that, some of the new results were discussed by the members of the French Academy, while at the same time they astounded and delighted the outside world. [Illustration: TEMPLE OF EDFÛ, LOOKING EAST: SHOWING PYLON AND OUTER COURT.]