[Illustration:  296.jpg JEAN FRANCOIS CHAMPOLLION]

Young’s initial studies of the Rosetta Stone were made in 1814; his later publications bore date of 1819.  Champollion’s first announcement of results came in 1822; his second and more important one in 1824.  By this time, through study of the cartouches of other inscriptions, he had made out almost the complete alphabet, and the “Riddle of the Sphinx” was practically solved.  He proved that the Egyptians had developed a relatively complete alphabet (mostly neglecting the vowels, as early Semitic alphabets did also) centuries before the Phoenicians were heard of in history.

Even this statement, however, must in a measure be modified.  These pictures are letters and something more.  Some of them are purely alphabetical in character, and some are symbolic in another way.  Some characters represent syllables.  Others stand sometimes as mere representatives of sounds, and again, in a more extended sense, as representatives of things, such as all hieroglyphics doubtless were in the beginning.  In a word, this is an alphabet, but not a perfected alphabet such as modern nations generally use.

The word “hieroglyphic” is applied, as we have seen, to various forms of picture writing; but the original interpretation which the Greeks, who invented it, put upon the word was the “holy writing” of the Egyptians.  The earliest Greek travellers who went to Egypt, when that country was finally opened up to the outside world, must have noticed the strange picture scrolls everywhere to be seen there on the temple walls, on obelisks, on statues, and mummy-cases, as well as on papyrus rolls, which were obviously intended to serve the purpose of handing down records of events to future generations.

It is now known that this writing of the Egyptians was of a most extraordinary compound character.  Part of its pictures are used as direct representations of the objects presented.  Here are some examples: 

[Illustration:  298.jpg PAGE IMAGE]

Again the picture of an object becomes an ideograph, as in the following instances: 

Here the sacred ibis or the sacred bull symbolises the soul.  The bee stands for honey, the eyes for the verb “to see.”  Yet again these pictures may stand neither as pictures of things nor as ideographs, but as having the phonetic value of a syllable.  Such syllabic signs may be used either singly, as above, or in combination, as illustrated below.

But one other stage of evolution is possible, namely, the use of signs with a purely alphabetical significance.  The Egyptians made this step also, and their strangely conglomerate writing makes use of the following alphabet: 

[Illustration:  299.jpg PAGE IMAGE]

In a word, then, the Egyptian writing has passed through all the stages of development, from the purely pictorial to the alphabetical, but with this strange qualification,—­that while advancing to the later stages it retains the use of crude earlier forms.  As Canon Taylor has graphically phrased it, the Egyptian writing is a completed structure, but one from which the scaffolding has not been removed.