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But gradually Egypt became a land of traders and these traders needed a means of communication beyond the spoken word. So they boldly took the little figures of the priests and simplified them for their own purposes. Thereafter they wrote their business letters in the new script which became known as the "popular language" and which we call by its Greek name, the "Demotic language."
In 1799 M. Bouchard, a French captain of engineers, while digging intrenchments on the site of an old temple near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, unearthed a black stone containing a trilingual inscription in hieroglyphics, demotic characters, and Greek.
We know, for instance, from the recent researches of the archaeologists, that in all the documents of the ancient Egyptians, written in the demotic or common character of the country, the names of the gods were invariably denoted by symbols; and I have already alluded to the different modes by which the Jews expressed the tetragrammaton.
This is the completed writing of the tale of Setna Kha.em.uast, and Na.nefer.ka.ptah, and his wife Ahura, and their Mid Mer-ab. It was written in the 35th year, the month Tybi. This tale of Setna only exists in one copy, a demotic papyrus in the Ghizeh Museum.
The scribe has a princely position; his pen and his book win him wealth and acceptance." After a sounding discourse on the dignity of knowledge, a discourse which Egyptian pupils had heard without change for three millenniums, the master took chalk and on the alabaster wall began to write the alphabet. Each letter was expressed through a number of hieroglyphs, or a number of demotic characters.
There is no trouble in deciphering demotic Greek and the hieroglyph minerals are quite simple. Once the papyrus left Baron von Kerber's possession, our exclusive right to it vanished, and you can hardly expect me to engage in an armed attack on the military forces of a friendly nation." "So far as the papyrus goes, it is utterly useless to any one," broke in von Kerber suddenly. Mr.
It was placed in the British Museum, and care was taken that copies of the three inscriptions should reach the various Egyptologists, among them Champollion. The demotic inscription that is to say, the text in the writing of the people, was one of the most inviting to decipher, because the signs composing it seemed to be letters representing sound.
But in any case they stood so detached from the hieroglyphic writing and its hieratic and demotic derivations, that they must be treated as a separate system. For the present the best course is to show here the similarity of forms between these marks and those known in Egypt in earlier and later times, adding the similar forms in the Karian and Spanish alphabets.
In the notebook which had come down with other belongings of Ferlini the Egyptologist, to Ferlini the artist, was a copy of certain Demotic writing, of a peculiar and little known form. The original had existed, according to the dead Ferlini's notes, on the wall of an antechapel in one of the most ruinous pyramids at Meroee, decorated in a peculiarly barbaric Ethiopian style.
What I expected was a reply in kind, an hieratic acceptance or a demotic refusal; either one would be good practice for Monny. But not a hieroglyph of any description came. I had to go on as if nothing had happened. To be ignored was less tolerable than being refused. Monny's silence began to get upon my nerves; and to make matters worse, there was that desert trip hanging over my head.
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