The Rutland daily globe. [volume] (Rutland, Vt.) 1873-1877, 1875-02-13
PRICE THREE CENTS.

stone, where moisture never came unleea
from the breath of the mourners. who
fondly thought they had concealed their
friends forever, kept for us not only the
pictures and the writings on the walls. but
the scrolls and relics Of Cheops. In 1851
the eminent French scholar, Marryat, dis.
covered at Memphis the tombs of the sa-
cred bulls, the incarceration of the god
Apis. One of these was never violated.
Marryat says ''When the door was broken
open, and | entered for the first time, |
found distinctly marked upon a fine layer
of dust which covered the floor the prints
of the feet Of a man who had buried a sar-
cophagus three thousand seven hundred
years before. have seen great many un-
finished chambers upon the tombs of The
hes, where the outline drawings and half
finished paintings were as bright and fresh
as If the artist only left his work Yesterday,
and might return at any moment. II war
and its attendant evils had not swept over
Egypt, IL Persian, Greek, Roman and Sar-
aeon did not in turn hurl down her temples.
shatter thousands of her monuments. and
burned the scrolls in the keeping of her
dead, we might possess at this day every
stone which her people raised, and almost
every word that they ever wrote Her sky
and air and rocks are natui al preseryers,
and the rougher elements are so slight as to
be nearly imperceptible Nowhere else in
the world is there such climate. As you
travel up the valley of the Nile and observe
the art of the temples raised by the shore
of the river, you almost fancy you breathe
the atmosphere of the early world, and
thousand years become as a day. Perhaps
the most marvellous fact connected with
this land is the death and resurrection of
its language and history. For fifteen hun
dred years our knowledge of Egypt, except
what we formed through the Greek writers
was a complete blank. You are at once
smitten with the ignorance of our knowl-
edge of its early history. Fifty years ago
only little spark dropped into this dense
darkness il soon found fuel and became
a steady flame, and ii now sends out the
illumination of daylight to the most re-
mote past. 1t is the broad way through
the wilderness in which almost all other
histories lose themselves when they recede.
And 1t is not yet entirely complete. There
are rough places in which.chasms still want
to be bridged and crossed, and they are So
steep that humt feet refuse to climb them.
But there is no other road we can travel so
far without losing ourselves, and let me
now very briefly describe how and to what
extent the ancient history of Egypt has
been recovered.
During the period of Napoleon's early
career Marryatt, French lieutenant Of
engineers, discovered at Rosetta n stone
containing inscriptions in three languages,
Greek, heroglyphic characters, and that
torn of Egyptian which is called denote
because ii was used by the people in writ
ing upon papyrus. 1t was simply an easy
practical way of writing, and il was dis
tinguished priest of Ptolemy, Epphanes
arranged and completed it between one
hundred and four and one hundred and
eighty-one years before Christ After load
ing him with the titles of the ancient Pha-
races, it announced that the priests of
Egypt at an assembly in Memphis had de-
cided to acknowledge the benefits he con-
ferred on the country and especially on
their class, by setting up his statue in the
temples and paying him divine honors. 1t
closed by stating that its decree should be
carved in enduring stone in Greek, hero
glyphics, and demotic characters, and
should be placed in the principal temples.
| The identity of the three inscriptions was
thus expressly declared, but it still seemed
a hopeless task to find the corresponding
words. In 1915, however, by great good
fortune, another stone, with three inscrip-
tons, in Greek, hieroglyphics, and denote,
was found, containing the names of Cleo
patra and Ptolomeus. This stone contained
the key to the hidden language of Egypt
and the man already lived who was destin-
ed to discover it. The Young French schol-
| ar Champolion engaged in the study with
the idea at the start that they were not only
symbols, but were also real alphabetic let
tiers represented by sound. 1t requires no
particular scholarship to understand his
method of investigation. He noticed that
the names of Ptolemeus and Cleopatra had
each the same five letters, p. Il. L. l.. and
| o. He compared them, and there they
stood repeated each in its proper place, cor
responding with the order of the character
letters. We have naturally supposed that
the world owes much to the famous Cleo
patra, but her name ought to be immortal
lied in diamonds for the service she has
thus rendered This discovery immedi-
ately gave Champoillon the key to all the
the letters in both names. He then took
another oval, which was supposed
to contain the name of Alexander the
Great, and found the letters A. L. Z. r.,
and subsequently by Egyptian words he
discovered the whole hieroglyphic charact-
ers including the number of different sounds
and their relation to matter There are
twenty five characters, the sounds of which
can be expressed by the Hebrew alphabet,
and an equal number of English letters
He found all the alphabet gave the wo, DIS
and their sounds: with the meaning belong
ing to each separately. Champolion read
the hieroglyphcs just as Milton taught his
daughters to read Greek and Hebrew, pro-
nouncing the language correctly, but with
out understanding single word of what
they read. He then discovered the lost key
before his death, in 1922, by which he es-
tablished the correct meaning of more than
700 other words, and left the way clear to
other scholars to follow him. Since then
the work is followed by the best minds in
France and Germany, until now 1000 words
have been correctly interpreted. Hero
glyphics represent symbols as well as signs.
For instance, there is the word waves,
which is represented in words relating to
the sea- and the holding of knife, in words
describing slaughter or violent death. So
plants and trees and other figures, are rep
resented and expressed, and Rameses the
second and Sesosrris of the Greeks are now
read with almost as much facility as the old
er forms OF Hebrew or the Language of the
Syrians. Champollion's discovery was pub.
lished in 1882, and within twenty five
years the work of Interpretation was so fai
advanced that historical research became
possible, but his examinations were made
very much at random. The result of his
researches embraced objects belonging to
dynasties two or three thousand years
apart, and they are brought together as il
they represented the same historical period.
The scholars began to quarrel as TO whether
Menes was historical or NEUROLOGICAL
ersonage, and the theory of chronology
varied from $500 to 6,000 years before the
Chi tian Era. 1t is only With tie last
few years that investigation has begun to
develop any useful or reliable information
The German scholar, Lepsius, was the first
to preceve the difference in the character
of the remains of ancient sculpture He
undoubtedly committed great outrages, ap
parently in the progress of his researches
and the Turks have acquired a prejudice
against his name. lie found another stone
tablet in two languages, the Greek and hier
| oulvnhic. II was larper than the Rosptff