An account of some recent discoveries in hieroglyphical literature, and Egyptian antiquities

From these specimens, we are also enabled to make some further inferences respecting the “popular” system of writing among the Egyptians. They show incontestably, that the employment of the alphabet, discovered by Akerblad, is not altogether confined to foreign, or at least to Grecian names: it is applicable, for example, very readily, to the words Lubais, Tbaeais, Phabis, and perhaps to some others. But they exhibit also unequivocal traces of a kind of syllabic writing, in which the names of some of the deities seem to have been principally employed, in order to compose that of the individual concerned: thus it appears, that wherever both M and N occur, either together, or separated by a vowel, the symbol of the god Ammon or Amun is almost uniformly employed: for example in Amenothes, Amonorytius, Amonrasonther, ChiMNaraus, PsenAMUNis, and SnachoMNeus, in which we find neither M nor N, but the symbol for Ammon, or Jupiter. It follows therefore, that such must have been the original pronunciation of the word, and that this deity was not called either HO or NO, as Akerblad was disposed to imagine. In the same manner we have traces of Osiris, Arueris, Isis, and Re; in Osoroeris, Petosiris, Senpoeris, Arsiesis, Maesis, and Peteartres. The SE, in PSEnamunis and Senerieus, is the symbol for a child, and is probably a contraction of SHERI: the gender seems to be distinguished in the enchorial name, while the distinction is lost in the alphabetical mode of writing.