Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

Ixxii Introduction.
Champollion, Lepsius, and Tattam, and reproductions of pages of
Reproductions Birch's Sketch of a Hieroglyphical Dictionary, Young's Rudiments of
an Egyptian Dictionary in the ancient Enchorial Character, Cham-
some early
Egyptological
works.
pollion's Dictionnaire glyphics.
figyptien, and Birch's Dictionary of Hiero-
These works are not to be found in every public, still
Semitic
alphabets.
The mistakes
of scribes and
transcribers,
their errors
and omissions.
less private, library, and I believe that many a reader will examine
and study them, if only from the point of view of the bibliographer.
The indexes to the Coptic and to the non-Egyptian words
and geographical names which are at the end of the book will show
that a considerable number of Coptic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic,
Ethiopic, Amharic, Assyrian and Persian words and names are
quoted in this Dictionary. The beginner who wishes to examine
these words will need to learn the alphabets of the principal
Semitic languages, and as I know of no Egyptological work in
which they are to be found,
I have included them in this Intro-
duction, and they follow the List of Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
APOLOGIA AND THANKS.
In the preparation of the manuscript of this Dictionary
for the printer I have not spared labour, or trouble, or time or
attention, and I have made every effort during the proof reading
to reduce misprints to a minimum. I have copied too many
texts in the course of my life not to know how easy it is for the
attention to be distracted, and the eye to be deceived, and the
hand to write something which it ought not to write when doing
work of this kind. The professional copyists of the Book of
the Dead, and the monastic scribes who laboriously transcribed
Coptic, Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic texts in Egypt, Ethiopia
and Syria, made many mistakes, mis-spelt the words of the archetypes
in their copies, omitted whole lines, and made nonsense
of many passages by omitting parts of words and mixing together
the remaining parts. It seems to me obvious from these facts
that every one who undertakes a long and very tedious work
like the making of an Egyptian Dictionary, must be guilty of
the perpetration of mistakes, blunders, and errors in his copying,
however careful he may be. In my work there will be found inconsistencies,
misunderstandings, and misprints, and probably down-
right misstatements, and as Maspero said in his edition of the
sans m'en etonner. . . . C'est
Pyramid Texts, " je le regrette
une infirmit6 de la nature humaine dont on finit par prendre son
parti, comme de bien d'autres." Notwithstanding such defects
I hope and believe that this Dictionary will be useful to the