A horizontal decorative rule appears at the top. It consists of a central diamond shape flanked by stylized leaf and scroll patterns.

LETTER TO MR. DACIER

REGARDING THE ALPHABET

OF PHONETIC HIEROGLYPHS.

SIR,

I owe to the kindness with which you honor me the gracious interest that the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres has been pleased to grant to my work on Egyptian scripts, by allowing me to submit to it my two memoirs on the hiératique hieratic or sacerdotal script, and on the démotique demotic or popular script; I shall finally dare, after this trial which is so flattering to me, to hope that I have succeeded in demonstrating that these two types of writing are both not alphabetic, as had been so generally thought, but idéographiques ideographic, like the hieroglyphs themselves, which is to say depicting ideas and not the sounds of a language; and I believe I have managed, after ten years of diligent research, to gather almost complete data on the general theory of these two types of writing, regarding the origin, nature, form, and number of their