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Ancient writings, coins and monuments do not authorize the belief that letters were known to the inhabitants of Greece, Italy or the adjacent islands, anterior to the eighth century, certainly not before the ninth century B. C. Perhaps the Asiatic Greeks preceded the Europeans in all the arts; but Homer, who was probably connected with them by birth, and who was certainly familiar with all their customs and manners, never alludes to the use or existence of letters, or even of hieroglyphical characters. But on the contrary he leads us directly to infer that he and his countrymen were ignorant of alphabetical signs.

II. USE OF LETTERS IN EGYPT.

1. There are no Egyptian coins now extant which belong to times before Alexander the Great.* But the want of coins is abundantly supplied by other sources of information. Numerous rolls of papyrus, of uncertain antiquity, have been found in the sarcophagi, and under the bandages of the mummies. Dr. Youngt published several Greek papyri. They are valuable and curious, and are unquestionably far older than any MS. previously known to be extant. But the oldest of them does not date earlier than the second century B. C.

2. Champollion found a roll of Papyrus at Aix in the collection of M. Sallier, containing a history of the wars of Sesostris, or Rameses, who reigned in the fifteenth century B. C. It professes to be written in the ninth year of his reign.‡

* Discoveries in Hieroglyphical Literature, Lond. 1823.

+ See Champollion, Lettres Ecrites d' Egypte et de Nubie, Paris, 1833, p. 21, 22. Greppos' Essay on the Hieroglyphic System, American translation, p. 176 sq. It is not for us to go behind M. Champollion and inquire if he really has in his hands a MS. written 3300 years before the date of his own work. We must abide by his decision. He promises to examine the MS. after his return from Egypt. We are ignorant of the result.

Madame Barbier de Longpres (cited by Eckhel IV. Ch. I., who calls her virago ornatissima,) fancies she had in her possession a coin of one of the old Pharaohs, Diod. Sic. Lib. I. 78, says there were ancient laws relating to base money. But this probably was not coined money but bullion, which was estimated by weight. It does not appear the Egyptians had any coins in the time of Cambyses, for he introduced Darics. The mythological coins with the image of the gods

"Osiris, Orus, Apis, Isis,"

belong to the time of the Roman emperors. The same may be said

3. Egyptian monuments with inscriptions are abundant. But in this inquiry all monuments, which contain inscriptions written entirely in pictures, like the Mexican writings (if any such are found in Egypt) must be rejected. They shed no light on the origin of letters, though they show how men continued to dispute with them. This inquiry must be limited to the alphabetic writing.

Alphabetic inscriptions occur frequently on ancient Egyptian monuments. Their genuineness is beyond dispute. Some of these monuments with inscriptions were erected between 161 A. C. and 332 B. C. In these the proper names are written in alphabetic characters.†

On an alabaster vase is the name of Xerxes, who lived at least 460 B. C., with another inscription in the wedge-shaped character, still found in the ruins of Persepolis. This monument is supposed to be contemporary with Xerxes. The name of Psammeticus is found on several monuments written in al- · phabetic characters. He lived 605 B. C., or if the first of that name is meant, 645 B. C., and the inscriptions were contemporary. Still further, the names of Petubastis, Osorthus and Psammus, (as the Greeks called them) have been found on funeral monuments, which were erected during the life-time of one of these kings, and have therefore at the lowest calculation, a date as old as 870 B. C. Sesonchis, (Shishak in Scripture,) also occurs in the alphabetic character. They reigned about 1000 B. C. But there are monuments still more ancient, with alphabetic inscriptions which were executed under the reign of the Pharaohs of the nineteenth dynasty, which ends, according to Manetho, about the time of the Trojan war. There are also some from the eighteenth dynasty, about 1800 B. C.¶

Rameses is an illustrious name in the history of the world, as well as in that of Egypt. His name is often found on those old monuments, and his conquests are detailed with great

of all the coins of cities or provinces; they all bear the image and superscription of some one of the Caesars.

See the alphabets in Champollion's Grammaire Egyptienne, Part I. Paris, 1835.

See Champollion, Precis du Systeme Hieroglyphique, Par, 1824, Chap. VIII. p. 175 sq.

Ibid. p. 193-196. ¶ Ibid. p. 212-217 sq.

§ Ibid. p. 196-203. || Ibid. 203-213.

minuteness. There are three of this name who are known to history. But the great Rameses, whose exploits are celebrated in these monuments, is called Sethosis by Manetho, Sesoosis by Diodorus Siculus, and Sesostris by Herodotus and Strabo. He lived about 1500 B. C.* The temples and monuments that he erected are still very numerous in Egypt, and contain beautiful bas-reliefs and long inscriptions setting forth the extent of his conquests and the glory of his reign.† Champollion mentions many other old Egyptian kings whose names he has rescued from oblivion and restored to a place in authentic history, and adds, "It is proved by reading the names of all these Pharaohs, that the sacred writings of the Egyptians, the writing called hieroglyphic was phonetic [or alphabetic] during the greater part of the first reigns of the eighteenth dynasty, that is to say, in the eighteenth century before the christian era." Again: "It is under the reign of the Pharaohs of this dynasty, that we must place the most brilliant epoch of the Egyptian monarchy. The first princes of this time expelled from lower and a portion of middle Egypt, those foreign hordes, known under the name of shepherds, and whom the Egyptians called Hyksos, that is, shepherd-captives. They restored their liberty, laws and religion, to a portion of the Egyptian nation, which for several centuries had groaned under the tyranny of these barbarians. It is also to kings of this family that Thebes owes all the splendor, which now, though in ruins, strikes travellers with admiration and awe. The vast palaces and temples of Karnac, Luxor, and Medina-Tabou, of Kourna, those which still exist at Memnonium, and Medamond, were built and adorned under the reign of these princes. These are the works, which prove to a certainty the high antiquity of Egyptian civilization and the high degree of advancement, that the arts and sciences attained in these ages far from us. These prove irrefutably that the Egyptians preceded other celebrated nations, and this historic antiquity will henceforth repose on an unshaken foundation, for it is based on public monuments, whose testimo

* Ibid. p. 212-225.

† Champollion, Lettres, etc. Lettre 14 and 18.

Precis, p. 242.

§ See the interesting chapter in Ammon's Fort bildung des Christenthum, on the Mosaic age according to the accounts of heathen historians.

ny cannot be refuted, and the most considerable of which, the great palace at Karnac,-continued, enlarged and adorned, for eleven centuries,-bears successively in its various parts, the royal legends of the greatest princes who have reigned in Egypt, from Amenophis I., of the eighteenth dynasty (about 1800 B. C.) to Psammeticus and others, kings of the twenty-sixth dynasty.

These relics of olden time corroborate the testimony of Manetho, and fully establish the fact that eighteen hundred years before the Christian era, the art of alphabetic writing on stone was practised and carried to a degree of perfection which was never surpassed even in the palmy days of Greek-Egyptian art. The scanty remnants of Egyptian art, which have reached us from the twentieth century B. C., an age, of which they are the only survivors, except traditions which it is as impossible to verify as to refute-show by the comparative rudeness both of the sculptures and the inscriptions, that the arts were then in their infancy. Writing was probably passing from the picture to the alphabetic letter. The manuscripts which have come down from ages not much later, afford a positive proof, not only that these characters can be used in writing books, but that they actually were so used. But even if it could be proved that these manuscripts are spurious, the fact of the existence of manuscripts in the seventeenth or eighteenth century B. C. is established by the representations of writers, and all their usual implements, still extant in the old bas-reliefs.‡

It is not necessary to pursue this investigation further. The design of this essay was to show that writing was known or

* Precis p. 242 sq.

It may be asked with seeming pertinency, why the spirited Greeks were so long without alphabetic writings when the Egyptians carried the art to such perfection twelve centuries before Zaleucus ? This question must be left with its propounders.

The genuineness of these MSS. or Papyri, may perhaps be doubted by some, though the authority of M. Champollion is almost decisive, but even if no MS. had reached us, the slightest inspection of the cursive character in his grammaire Egyptiene, will convince any one, that it could be applied to ordinary writing. Indeed we are told that Billet-doux in the Egyptian character were " currently reciprocated" among the Petits-Maîtres and their fair coadjutors in Paris a few years since. A very readable text in this character may be seen in Champollion's Pantheon Egyptien, Livraison XII.

SECOND SERIES, VOL. II. NO. III.

12

was not known in the time of Moses, so that the direct inquiry upon the genuineness of the Pentateuch may not be encumbered by any uncertainty attending the previous question. The subject has not been pursued through the broad and uncertain fields of Hindoo or Chinese literature and history, because the question is determined by the history of Egypt alone, and because the present state of our knowledge of the literature of the South and East of Asia renders such inquiries unsatisfactory and their results worthless, unless the writers are familiar with the languages of that region. Enough, it is trusted, has been obtained to prove that letters were well known in Egypt in the time of Moses, and therefore that he who was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, was able to write the Pentateuch in Egyptian characters. If the Pentateuch were shown to be the work of a later age, we think that no argument to that effect could be derived from the state of alphabetic writing in those times.

ARTICLE V.

NORMAL SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS' SEMINARIES.

By Calvin E. Stowe, D. D., Prof. of Bibl. Literature, Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio. `

Ich versprach Gott: Ich will jedes preussische Bauerkind für ein Wesen ansehen, das mich bei Gott verklagen kann, wenn ich ihm nicht die beste Menschen- und Christen-Bildung schaffe, die ich ihm zu schaffen vermag.

I promised God, that I would look upon every Prussian peasant child as a being who could complain of me before God, if I did not provide for him the best education as a man and a Christian, which it was possible for me to provide.

Dinter's Letter to Baron von Altenstein.

WHEN the benevolent Franke turned his attention to the subject of popular education in the city of Hamburg, late in the seventeenth century, he soon found that children could not be well taught without good teachers, and that but few good teachers could be found unless they were regularly trained for the profession. Impressed with this conviction he bent all his energies towards the establishment of a Teachers' Seminary, in

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