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

10

Among the cartouches collected from the various buildings of Karnak at Thebes, and published in the Description de l'Égypte Description of Egypt, a major French scholarly work (A., volume III, plate 38), I noticed one of these cartouches numbered 13 (1), composed of signs already known for the most part according to the preceding analysis, and which are found in the following order: the hawk, A; the recumbent lion, L; a large ringed vase, still unknown; the curved stroke, S; the single feather, E or any other short vowel; the sign commonly called the water sign, unknown; the open hand, T; the mouth from the front, R; two horizontal sceptres facing each other, still unknown. These letters joined together give AL.SE.TR.; and by assigning to the ringed vase the value of K, to the water hieroglyph the value of N, and to the final sign the value of S, one has the word ALKSENTRS, which is written thus, letter for letter, in demotic script, in the Rosetta inscription and in the papyrus of the King's cabinet, in the place of the Greek name ALEXANDER original: "ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΣ" (2).

This new name thus gives us three more phonetic characters, corresponding to the Greek letters K, N, and S.

It is easy to justify the value that we assign to them.

The ringed vase is a new form of the K, already designated in the name CLEOPATRA by a quarter-circle. We have already seen also that the letter T was likewise represented by two different signs; but one

(1) See my Plate I, number 25. (2) Ibid., number 1 and number 13.