Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

INTRODUCTION.
IT may be taken for granted that, from the time when Akerblad,
Young and Champollion le Jeune laid the foundation of the
science of Egyptology in the first quarter of the nineteenth century
down to the present day, every serious student of Egyptian texts,
whether hieroglyphic, hieratic or demotic, has found it necessary
to compile in one form or another his own Egyptian Dictionary.
In these days when we have at our disposal the knowledge which
has been acquired during the last hundred years by the unceasing
toil of the above-mentioned pioneers and their immediate Labours of
followers Birch, Lepsius, Brugsch, Chabas, Goodwin, E. de
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Rouge and others we are apt to underrate the difficulties which lexico-
they met and overcame, as well as to forget how great is the debt raP which we owe to them. I therefore propose, before passing on to
describe the circumstances under which the present Egyptian
Hieroglyphic Dictionary has been produced, to recall briefly
the labours of the " famous men " who have preceded me in the
field of Egyptian lexicography, and " who were honoured in their
generations, and were the glory of their times."
The Abbe J. J. Barthelemy (1716-1795) as far back as 1761 Akerblad and
showed satisfactorily that the ovals in Egyptian inscriptions Zpega's
which we call " cartouches " contained royal names. Zoega
(1756-1809) accepted this view, and, developing it, stated that the
a
hieroglyphs in them were alphabetic letters. 1 Had Akerblad
(1760-1819) and S. de Sacy (1758-1838) accepted these facts,
and worked to develop them, the progress of Egyptological
science would have been materially hastened. They failed, how-
ever, to pay much attention to the hieroglyphic inscriptions of
which copies were available, and devoted all their time and labour
to the elucidation of the enchorial, or demotic, text on the Rosetta Silvestre de
Stone, the discovery of which had roused such profound interest
among the learned men of the day. Their labours in connection
with this text were crowned with considerable success. To
Akerblad belongs the credit of being the first European to formulate
a " Demotic Alphabet," and to give the values of its characters in
Coptic letters, but neither he nor S. de Sacy seems to have sus-
pected the existence of a hieroglyphic alphabet. Both these
eminent scholars produced lists, or small vocabularies, of demotic
1
See my Rosetta Stone, vol. I, p. 40.
3
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