THE NEW SOHAFF-HERZOG
necessary to give specific details, so that the identification of the events is often doubtful or impossible. Not seldom, the inscriptions are mere laudations of the Pharaoh, or, again, are hymns in praise of him. Others are records of building enterprises, giving the personal history of the ruler or administrator. Decrees of administration appear. In private tombs records of filial performance in the maintenance of the tomb occur, and there are also found interesting accounts referring to wars or enterprises otherwise unknown. The longest inscriptions are the Pyramid texts of the Pharaohs of the fifth and sixth dynasties, discovered in 1880, dealing largely with matters religious, including magic. The Palermo Stone is one of the most noted monuments — a fragment of a stele containing a record of pre-dynastic kings, continuing to the middle of the fifth dynasty, and giving brief royal annals. The various erections at Karnak afforded space for voluminous inscriptions, to some of which reference must be made later.
Since the fifteenth century attempts were made to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics, though without success till the early part of the 3. The Ro- nineteenth century. But meanwhile a *& &D °?° foundation was laid for a broader and phennent soun^er appreciation of Egyptian archeology by the work done on Coptic since the time of Athanasius Kircher, who published the first Coptic grammar (Rome, 1643-44). The apoch-making work of Champollion (see below) was in no small part due to his mastery of Coptic. But all attempts to read the hieroglyphics were complete failures until the key was furnished by the Rosetta Stone. This is a slab of black granite, three feet nine inches by two feet four and a half inches and eleven inches thick, bearing an inscription in hieroglyphic and demotic Egyptian and in Greek. It was found in 1799 by M. Boussard, a French military officer, at Fort St. Julien, near Rosetta, on the Rosetta branch of the Nile (40 m. n.e. of Alexandria), was taken to England after the fall of Alexandria, and was presented to the British Museum by George III. (1801). The upper portion and the lower right-hand corner are broken away. It contains a decree of the Egyptian priests in honor of Ptolemy V. Epiphanes (205-181 B.C.), and its date is Mar. 27, 195 B.C. It bears 100 lines of text, fourteen of hieroglyphic (about half of the original), thirtytwo of demotic, and fifty-four of Greek (the ends of some of the lines broken off). Its significance is not in its contents, but in the fact that it proved to be the key to the decipherment of the hieroglyphic and demotic writing, and consequently opened up nearly all that is known of and through Egyptian texts. The results gained through the decipherment of this text were checked and confirmed by the trilingual stele of Canopus found by Lepsius at Tanis in 1866, containing a similar decree of the year 238 b.c, in honor of Ptolemy III. Euergetes I. (247-222 B.C.). Yet the process of decipherment was somewhat tedious. Sylvestre de Sacy (1802) detected several groups in the demotic text which corresponded to the Greek forms of the names Ptolemy, Berenice, and Alexander. The Swede J. D. Akerblad (1802) obtained the phonetic
values of most of the demotic characters in the proper names and used the Coptic to determine the meaning of several words. Thomas Young (1814), an English scientist, determined the meanings of several groups of demotic characters and established four alphabetical hieroglyphic characters. Jean Franco's Champollion put the crown upon all these efforts by reading from a bilingual obelisk in Philse, in hieroglyphic and Greek, the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, deciphering the names of Greek and Roman rulers, making out all the characters, discovering ideograms and determinatives, gaining insight into the phonetic system, and discerning the relations of the three kinds of script. He made a statement of his discoveries and expounded his system to the Academie des Inscriptions, Sept. 22, 1822. Karl Richard Lepsius worked on the lines of Champollion and corrected some mistakes, but proved the general soundness of Champollion's conclusions against the captious and envious criticism of several German writers. The science of Egyptology has been advanced by many later scholars, such as, to name only a few, Emmanuel de Rouge, Auguste Mariette, Paul Pierret, Jacques de Morgan and Gaston Maspero in France, Heinrich Brugsch, Alfred Wiedemann, Georg Ebers, Adolf Erman and Georg Steindorff in Germany, John Gardner Wilkinson, Samuel Birch, Peter le Page Renouf, Edward Naville, Ernest Alfred Thompson, Wallis Budge, and William Matthew Flinders-Petrie in England, W Max Miiller and James Henry Breasted in the United States.
The scantiness of illustration of Biblical history
afforded by the Egyptian monuments as compared
with the abundance gained from the
. ' . . us". Assyro-Babylonian records has been tration of , J J e , .
the Bible. many a cause of great disap-
pointment. The explanation of this scantiness is, however, not hard to discover. One reason is the vagueness of Egyptian records (see above). Another, which is on the surface, is that after the Hebrews settled in Palestine contact of Egypt with Palestine was occasional and not always of such a character as to dispose the monument-makers to speak of it — they recorded only victories, not failures or defeats. That mention of the Hebrews who had broken away from Egyptian control would appear in the inscriptions was hardly to be expected, nor that pre-Mosaic Israel would be differentiated from the numerous nomads of Semitic stock who occasionally sought refuge in the Nile land. Accordingly, apart from that general illustration of manners of living which is a consequence of a sort of commonality of life in the East, little of specific detail need be looked for from the Egyptian inscriptions either corroborating or contradicting Biblical statements, especially if, according to the view now generally accepted, the Hebrews were very few in numbers. What little specific illustration there is takes on either a geographical or ethnological character. The first comes through the mention of places conquered in Palestine by the Pharaohs. Thothmes III. (eighteenth dynasty), who made fifteen expeditions into Syria and Palestine, has recorded in the temple of Anion at Karnak, on the wall of the southern pylon and on the north-