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

graphic texts the proper names and words foreign to the Egyptian language. One easily senses the indispensable necessity of such an institution in an ideographic writing system. The Chinese, who also use an ideographic script, employ a very similar process created for the same reason.

The Rosetta monument presents us with the application of this auxiliary writing system that we have called phonetic, which is to say expressing sounds, in the proper names of the kings Alexander, Ptolemy, of the queens Arsinoe, Berenice, in the proper names of six other persons, Aetes, Pyrrha, Philinus, Areia, Diogenes, Irene, in the Greek word Syntaxis original: ΣΥΝΤΑΞΙΣ collection or contribution and in Ouenn original: ΟΥΗΝΝ the Ionians or Greeks (1).

A manuscript on papyrus, in demotic script, recently acquired for the King’s cabinet, has also given us the names Alexander, Ptolemy, Berenice, and Arsinoe, similar to those on the Rosetta monument, as well as the phonetic names of King Eupator and Queen Cleopatra, and those of three Greek persons, Apollonius, Antiochus, and Antigone (2).

(1) See my Plate I, numbers 1 to 12, and the explanation of the plates.

(2) See my plate I, numbers 13 to 21. This demotic manuscript is among the papyri in various languages that the King’s library has just purchased from Mr. Cazati, and about which Mr. St-Martin gave an interesting notice in the Journal des Savants in the month of September. According to my translation of the protocol of this demotic contract, it is a public act from the reign of Evergetes II, in which are named three Cleopatras: Cleopatra his sister and wife, Cleopatra