Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

A friend offers
to defray the
cost of
printing the
Dictionary.
The printing
of the
Dictionary
begun in
England.
Contents
of this
Dictionary.
1 Introduction.
to use, and I lacked the skill of Brugsch in writing the
transfers.
Soon after my conversation with Mr. Hart I had the oppor-
tunity of placing my difficulty before a friend an English gentleman
who has been all his life intensely interested in the ancient
languages of the Near East, and has proved himself to be a
generous patron and supporter of English archaeological enterprise
in Egypt and Western Asia for many years past. This gentleman,
who persists in his determination to remain anonymous, gave
me a sympathetic hearing, and a few days later wrote and offered
to defray the cost of printing the Dictionary in Vienna. With
heartfelt gratitude I accepted this munificent offer, and made
preparations to take the manuscript, which filled seven large
tray-boxes, each about two feet three inches in length, to Vienna
in May, 1914. The completing of a piece of work on which I
was then engaged made it necessary for me to postpone my
journey from the spring till the early autumn, when I hoped
to conclude my negotiations with Messrs. Holzhausen speedily,
and to begin to print before the end of the year. The delay
was providential for the Dictionary, for the Great War broke
out early in August, and my manuscript was safe in England ;
had it been in Vienna it would have been impossible to regain
possession of it for a very considerable time, and even if I had
eventually succeeded in recovering it, its publication must have
been delayed for some years. As things were, I was able,
with the consent of my friend and benefactor, to open
negotiations with Messrs. Harrison and Sons for. the printing
of the book, and very soon after their completion the printing
began.
The present Dictionary of Egyptian Hieroglyphs contains
nearly twenty-three thousand forms of Egyptian words collected
from texts of all periods between the time of the Illrd Dynasty
and the Roman Period. Strictly speaking, the words belonging
to each of the great periods of Egyptian literature should have
been printed in separate sections, but the time for making such
a series of Egyptian Dictionaries has not yet arrived,
it seems to
me. Birch excluded from his Dictionary the names of deities
and the names of places, and printed lists of them as Appendices
to his Dictionary of words. Pierret included in his " Vocabu-
laire " the names of deities, kings and places, and made it to
contain practically all the essential parts of the Hieroglyphic
Dictionaries of Birch and Brugsch, Champollion's " Pantheon