The fact is that in the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, hundreds of characters are employed as well as the letters of the alphabet; these characters represent syllables, words, or ideas, and could be used instead of the letters, almost at the pleasure of the writer. This gradually became apparent to Champollion, and as, fortunately, there are a very great number of copies extant of the same MSS., he was able, by laborious and persevering collation of those MSS., to determine the phonetic value of a great number of characters. To use a familiar illustration, it is as though two copies of an English sentence were compared by a foreigner who was acquainted only with the alphabet; in one of them occurred the word _three_ and the word _and_, whilst in the other copy, in the places occupied by those words, appeared the character 3 and the character &; or in an astronomical treatise, he would find the words _sun_ and _Taurus_ interchangeable with the signs ☉ and ♉. It would clearly be possible for him to read the four signs into the words for which they respectively stand, by a comparison of copies. The only difference is that the use of signs, whether for syllables, words, or ideas, is carried to such an immense extent in the old Egyptian writing, that their decipherment was a work of the most arduous kind. Champollion, nevertheless, succeeded in recovering and reading the old Egyptian language to a great extent, and his work has been ardently carried forward by his successors. The language, however, even when deciphered and read, must have remained unintelligible, if modern Coptic (the descendant of the ancient tongue) had not afforded the key to its translation. INDEX.