te alphabet (mostly neglecting the vowels,
as early Semitic alphabets did also) centuries before the Phoenicians
were heard of in history. What relation this alphabet bore to the
Phoenician we shall have occasion to ask in another connection; for the
moment it suffices to know that those strange pictures of the Egyptian
scroll are really letters.

Even this statement, however, must be in a measure modified. These
pictures are letters and something more. Some of them are purely
alphabetical in character and some are symbolic in another way.
Some characters represent syllables. Others stand sometimes as mere
representatives of sounds, and again, in a more extended sense, as
representations of things, such as all hieroglyphics doubtless were
in the beginning. In a word, this is an alphabet, but not a perfected
alphabet, such as modern nations are accustomed to; hence the enormous
complications and difficulties it presented to the early investigators.

Champollion did not live to clear up all these mysteries. His work was
taken up and extended by his pupil Rossellini, and in particular by Dr.
Richard Lepsius in Germany, followed by M. Bernouf, and by Samuel
Birch of the British Museum, and more recently by such well-known
Egyptologists as MM. Maspero and Mariette and Chabas, in France, Dr.
Brugsch, in Germany, and Dr. E. Wallis Budge, the present head of the
Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum. But the
task of later investigators has been largely one of exhumation and
translation of records rather than of finding methods.

TREASURES FROM NINEVEH

The most casual wanderer in the British Museum can hardly fail to notice
two pairs of massive sculptures, in the one case winged bulls, in the
other winged lions, both human-headed, which guard the entrance to the
Egyptian hall, close to the Rosetta Stone. Each pair of these weird
creatures once guarded an entrance to the palace of a king in the famous
city of Nineveh. As one stands before them his mind is carried back over
some twenty-seven intervening centuries, to the days when the "Cedar of
Lebanon" was "fair in his greatness" and the scourge of Israel.

The very Sculptures before us, for example, were perhaps seen by Jonah
when he made that famous voyage to Nineveh some seven or eight hundred
years B.C. A little later the Babylonian and the Mede revolted against
Assyrian tyranny and descended upon the fair city of Nineveh, and almost
literally level