The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts, July-December, 1827Various
Science
The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts, July-December, 1827
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
You will be glad to hear that I have made some little progress in
study of the Enchorial inscriptions which I had lately the pleasure
of showing you: my steps have, as usual, been guided by no _system_
whatever: they have been wholly _empirical_, and though very slow, I
trust they are so much the more sure: and I hope they will at least
serve as an excuse for my reminding you of the expectations you
kindly allowed me to entertain, that you would send me copies of any
thing of the kind that you might find among the objects entrusted
to your care at Turin. What I have lately done has only been to
ascertain the dates of many of the tablets sent by Mr. Salt [p311]
from Sacchara, all of them about the time of the last Cleopatra:
to identify the Enchorial name of Ptolemy DIONYSUS, and to make
out a passage relating to a donation of MUCH GOLD AND SILVER AND
GEMS TO THE SANCTUARY OF THE GREAT GOD AT MEMPHIS. The different
forms of the characters employed by the writers, in the same words,
constitute also a valuable addition to be means of deciphering any
new inscriptions of a similar nature, and I have already incorporated
many of them with my little Enchorial Dictionary.
The 48th and 49th plates of the Hieroglyphics, already published,
contain two tablets, apparently funerary, but without any dates of
the reigns: the ages of the persons seem to be expressed in the
hieroglyphical lines. In the 49th we find the name Berenice twice in
the Enchorial letters, and once in hieroglyphics; followed here by
Arsinoe, possibly as her mother.
This tablet, coarse as it is, abundantly shows that Horapollo and
Champollion are both correct, independently, as it seems, of each
other, in considering the rings, or cartouches, as chiefly confined
to the names of royal personages; and that I inferred the contrary
somewhat too hastily, from observing that the _imitations_ of those
rings were attached in the Enchorial inscription of Rosetta, to
several names not royal, and from having found such rings in other
hieroglyphical inscriptions, without the usual epithets of kings.
I had, indeed, remarked, that a “mysterious” name was _sometimes_
observable in the manuscripts without a ring, and I had pointed out
the same group as _a_ name in Lord Mountnorris’s manuscript, which
Mr. Champollion considers as the true name: but I am perfectly ready
to admit that Mr. Champollion has materially _improved_ on this hint,
as he has on many others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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