of truth. The use made, especially by some modern French philosophers, of recent discoveries sufficiently justifies the latter conclusion; and the well known opinions of the whole body of French savans who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, amply accorded with such views. A pleasant anecdote is told in connexion with the novel union of a philosophic and military expedition which set sail together from France for the ancient seat of Egyp· tian civilization and learning. "When the First Consul crossed the Mediterranean on his Egyptian expedition, he carried with him a cohort of savans, who ultimately did good service in many ways. Among them, however, as might be expected at that era, were not a few philosophers of the Voltaire-Diderot school. Napoleon, for his own instruction and amusement on shipboard, encouraged disputation among these gentlemen; and on one occasion they undertook to show, and, according to their own account, did demonstrate, by infallible logic and metaphysics, that there is no God. Bonaparte, who hated all ideologists, abstract reasoners, and logical demonstrators, no matter what they were demonstrating, would not fence with these subtle dialecticians, but had them immediately on deck, and pointing to the stars in the clear sky, replied by way of counter argument, 'Very good, messieurs ! but who made all these ?" " Such was one class of the students of Egyptian antiquities at the close of last century, though with them, too, there were not wanting equally zealous champions of Divine truth, who were little likely to let such a "packed jury" give an unchallenged verdict on the subject under review. Sympathies of a widely opposite class have thus been enlisted in the desire for recovering the hidden lore of Egypt. The classical scholar looked to it for explanation of many disputed allusions of Plato and Aristotle. The student of science was not without hope that secrets in medicine, in astronomy, in mathematics, might be hid under these strange symbols, amid which he was able to trace as in the gorgeous ceiling at Dendera-the records of a system of astronomical science, established ere the barbarian Roman had laid the foundatian of his younger empire. To these several motives for investigating the secrets of Egyptian records, we may add the scarcely less influential one of natural curiosity, and the desire to overcome obstacles which had so long baffled the most zealous assailants. To this latter source may be ascribed, with considerable justice, much of the zeal which was manifested by the savans of the eighteenth century, and the very questionable results which it produced. Without any very special cause arousing general attention to the subject, various disclosures sufficed from time to time to keep some degree of interest alive. Travellers occasionally overcame the obstacles to the exploration of the ancient scenes of Egyptian art and worship, and brought back with them fresh glimpses of the wonders disclosed to their view; not rarely adding to these some new theories and speculations of their own, calculated, as they conceived, to throw some light on the mysteries of the Nile. The fruits of all this were more abundant than valuable. Ponderous folios and quartos were written, full of learning and ingenuity, but yielding no real knowledge on the subject they professed to investigate; and students seemed at length disposed to turn with hopeless apathy or disgust from a subject on which the curiosity and the learning of nearly sixteen centuries had been expended, almost without a single result of trustworthy character, or apparently of the slightest real value. Such was the state of the subject, and the prevailing tone of feeling throughout Europe, in regard to the enduring memorials of primeval civilization, when the sagacious eye of the First Consul of Republican France was turned towards the old historical land, as the possible centre of a future commercial empire that should hold an equal balance between the East and the West, and transfer to And was the safeguard of the West: the worth We owe, undoubtedly, to the ambitious projects of Napoleon, both the revival of general interest in Egyptian antiquities, and the acquirement of the means for turning these to account. "Before the year 1800," says Gliddon, "Egypt was a sealed book, whose pages could not be opened, until Napoleon's thunder-bolts had riven the clasps asunder." The soldier of Corsica has indeed riven many venerable clasps asunder, that, but for him might long enough have remained unopened. Whatever view we take of the restless and insatiable ambition of Napoleon, it affords no trifling evidence of the beneficent influence of civilization in controlling and overruling the evils of war, to find the soldiers of France accompanied by a body of savans, no less ambitious for trophies won in the peaceful triumphs of science, than were the veteran legions covetous of the bloody trophies of victory. Yet, strange to say, the greatest trophy won by science from this expedition, was the fruit of the soldiers' and not the savans' labours; and furnished a more valuable contribution to our knowledge than all that had been accomplished by the investigations, or the learning of centuries, in the celebrated stone already referred to. In digging the foundations of a fort near Rosetta, at one of the mouths of the Nile, the French discovered an inscribed block of black basalt, which, along with other antiquities secured by the army of Napoleon in Egypt, were resigned to the British general, and adorn the Egyptian Gallery in the British Museum. Among these the inscribed block of basalt is conspicuous, and is now fami K liarly known as the Rosetta Stone. This valuable relic, which forms one of the most interesting features of the Egyptian collection in the Museum, contains an inscription in three distinct characters-the Hieroglyphic, or sacred; the Enchorial, or common Egyptian; and the Greek. From the terms of the latter, it became immedi ately apparent that the three inscriptions were versions of the same decree, in these several characters; and this was further confirmed by observing that the hieroglyphic inscription ends with the numerals I. II. and III., where the Greek has "The first and the second...." the remainder being broken away. A key had been at length found to the long hidden mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which had mocked the curious zeal of ages with the vain offer of unrevealed secrets. Yet this seemed long to be utterly illusive. The Greek text was indeed speedily translated; but its contents added no other information to our previous knowledge, than that such was the general tenour of the hieroglyphic writing. Its letters, words, sentences, forms of speech, or modes of writing, seemed as dark and unintelligible as ever; and so they remained for years, after accurate fac-similes of its inscriptions had been distributed among the first scholars of Europe. England had secured the valuable though puzzling relic, and to an Englishman, the honour is due of having read the mysterious riddle. Dr. Thomas Young was the first to master any of the unknown hieroglyphics. With great sagacity, he noted the recurrence of certain words, such as Alexander, Ptolemy, &c.; and in corresponding parts both of the enchorial and hieroglyphic inscriptions, he detected equivalent groups of characters, and established the important fact, which had been previously assumed as probable by Zoega, an eminent Danish scholar, that proper names are distinguished by the enclosing oval or royal cartouche, of such frequent occurrence on all Egyptian monuments. These he suc ceeded in reducing to their elementary alphabetic charac ters, and thus established the phonetic use of hieroglyphics; or in other words, their application, like modern alphabetic characters, to represent sounds, instead of symbols. This discovery, however, sufficed to prove at the same time that the Greek is not a literal translation of the Egyptian. The names do not invariably recur in corresponding places of the several inscriptions, nor are they repeated equally, synonymes or pronouns being substituted for them; so that the Greek cannot be assumed as expressing more than the general meaning of the other inscriptions. This of course greatly detracts from the value of the Rosetta Stone as a key to hieroglyphics; and though it has now been familiar to the scholars of Europe for nearly half a century, a literal translation of its symbols has only been partially effected. Much of the earlier difficulty arose from the extravagant anticipations of hieroglyphic students, to which we have already referred. "From the preconceived notion," says a recent critical writer, "that each hieroglyph was the representative of a distinct idea, the great object of ambition came to be, to extort per force the esoteric meaning which it was supposed to involve. It was never doubted that the most profound mysteries of nature and art lay hidden in these monumental sculptures; the simplest characters were conceived to be the types of ideas too lofty for vulgar comprehension, and worthy of the eternal records to which their preservation had been consigned. Thus, imagination usurping the place of reason, and conjecture that of fact; the learned, who had addicted themselves to these inquiries, soon became involved in an inextricable labyrinth, and like Milton's devils, posed by their metaphysical speculations, 'found no end in wandering mazes lost."" But these erroneous anticipations are fortunately at an end, and the inscriptions of Egypt have now been sufficiently mastered, to show what may |
