“Coptic.” The knowledge of Coptic has never been lost, and a comparatively large sacred literature has always been available in manuscripts for study by scholars. Champollion, whilst still a youth in the early years of the nineteenth century, realized the great importance of Coptic for the purpose of Egyptian decipherment, and he studied it to such good purpose that he became an authority on the language and literature of the Copts. In his studies of the inscription on the Rosetta Stone, his knowledge of Coptic enabled him to deduce the phonetic values of many syllabic signs, and to assign correct readings to many pictorial characters, the meanings of which were made known to him by the Greek text on the Stone. METHOD OF DECIPHERMENT. The method by which the greater part of the Egyptian alphabet was recovered is this: It was assumed correctly that the oval [blank cartouche], or “cartouche” as it is called, always contained a royal name. There is only one cartouche (five times repeated with slight modifications) on the Rosetta Stone, and this was assumed to contain the name of Ptolemy, because it was certain from the Greek text that the inscription concerned a Ptolemy. It was also assumed that if the cartouche did contain the name of Ptolemy, the characters in it would have the sounds of the Greek letters, and that all together they would represent the Greek form of the name of Ptolemy. Now on the obelisk which Mr. Bankes had brought from Philæ there is an inscription in two languages, Egyptian and Greek. In the Greek portion of it two royal names are mentioned, that is to say, Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and on the second face of the obelisk there are two cartouches, which occur close together, and are filled with hieroglyphs which, it was assumed, formed the Egyptian equivalents of these names. When these cartouches were compared with the cartouche on the Rosetta Stone it was found that one of them contained hieroglyphic characters that were almost identical with those which filled the cartouche on the Rosetta Stone. Thus there was good reason to believe that the cartouche on the Rosetta Stone contained the name of Ptolemy written in hieroglyphic characters. The forms of the cartouches are as follows: On the Rosetta Stone [cartouche] On the Obelisk from Philæ [cartouche] The second of these cartouches contains the sign [glyph], which is wanting in the first, and the single sign [glyph] takes the place of the three signs [glyph] at the end of the first cartouche. Now it has already been said that the name of Cleopatra was found in Greek on the Philæ Obelisk, and the cartouche which was assumed to contain the Egyptian equivalent of this name appears in this form: [cartouche] Taking the cartouches which were supposed to contain the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra from the Philæ Obelisk, and numbering the signs we have: