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

phonetic value of the fifteen hieroglyphic signs taken from the three cartouches that have just been analyzed.

On the ceiling of the great triumphal gateway at Karnak in Thebes Description of Egypt, Antiquities, volume 3, plate 50., one finds the phonetic cartouche of a Ptolemy. This is followed by the titles ever living, beloved of Ptah in ideographic characters. It is accompanied by a cartouche that is necessarily a woman's name, since it ends with the ideographic signs for the feminine gender, like the hieroglyphic name of Queen Cleopatra already discovered. In this new name of a Lagid Ptolemaic queen, we easily recognize the name of Berenice. By using the hieroglyphic-phonetic characters already established, we see it is spelled BRNEKS original: "ΒΡΝΗΚΣ", almost exactly as in the demotic papyrus in the King's cabinet. This proper name See my plate I, numbers 32 and 33. gives us a new phonetic sign: the B, represented by a kind of patera shallow ritual bowl original: "patère". It also provides

It was likely due to the shape of this sign, which has some similarity to the representation of a basket, that Dr. Young was led to recognize the name of Berenice in the cartouche that indeed contains it. However, this English scholar thought that the hieroglyphs forming proper names could express entire syllables: that they were a kind of rebus. For example, he thought the initial sign of the name Berenice represented the syllable Bir, which means basket in the Egyptian language. This starting point largely invalidated the phonetic analysis he attempted on the names of Ptolemy and Berenice. Nevertheless, he did recognize the phonetic value of four signs: P, one form of T, one form of M, and one form of I. However, his entire syllabic alphabet...