Lettre à M. Dacier, ... relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques

I.

from all sides monuments are arriving and being collected by sovereigns and enthusiasts alike, when also, and regarding them, scholars from all countries hasten to engage in laborious research and strive to penetrate deeply into the knowledge of these written monuments which must serve to explain all the others, I do not believe I should wait for another time to offer these scholars, under your honorable auspices, a short but important series of new facts. These naturally belong to my Memoir on hieroglyphic writing and will undoubtedly save them the trouble I took to establish them, and perhaps also prevent serious errors regarding the various periods of the history of arts and the general administration of Egypt: for this concerns the series of hieroglyphs which, being an exception to the general nature of the signs of this script, were endowed with the faculty of expressing the sounds of words, and served to inscribe on the public monuments of Egypt the titles, names, and surnoms epithets or surnames of the Greek or Roman sovereigns who governed it successively. Many certainties for the history of this famous land must arise from this new result of my research, to which I was led very naturally.

The interpretation of the demotic text of the Rosetta Inscription by means of the accompanying Greek text had made me recognize that the Egyptians used a certain number of demotic characters to which they had attributed the faculty of expressing sounds, in order to introduce into their ideo-