17th century, and
reached a high level in the work of the Dane Georg Zoega (1755-1809) at
the end of the 18th century. In 1835, too late for Champollion to use
it, Amadeo Peyron (1785-1870) of Turin published a Coptic lexicon of
great merit which is still standard, though far from satisfying the
needs of scholars of the present day. In 1880 Ludwig Stern (_Koptische
Grammatik_) admirably classified the grammatical forms of Coptic. The
much more difficult task of recovering the grammar of Egyptian has
occupied thirty years of special study by Adolf Erman and his school at
Berlin, and has now reached an advanced stage. The greater part of
Egyptian texts after the Middle Kingdom having been written in what was
even then practically a dead language, as dead as Latin was to the
medieval monks in Italy who wrote and spoke it, Erman selected for
special investigation those texts which really represented the growth of
the language at different periods, and, as he passed from one epoch to
another, compared and consolidated his results.

The _Neuagyptische Grammatik_ (1880) dealt with texts written in the
vulgar dialect of the New Kingdom (Dyns. XVIII. to XX.). Next
followed, in the _Zeitschrift fur agyptische Sprache und
Alterthumskunde_, studies on the Old Kingdom inscription of Una, and
the Middle Kingdom contracts of Assiut, as well as on an "Old Coptic"
text of the 3rd century A.D. At this point a papyrus of stories
written in the popular language of the Middle Kingdom provided Erman
with a stepping-stone from Old Egyptian to the Late Egyptian of the
_Neuagyptische Grammatik_, and gave the connexions that would bind
solidly together the whole structure of Egyptian grammar (see _Sprache
des Papyrus Westcar_, 1889). The very archaic pyramid texts enabled
him to sketch the grammar of the earliest known form of Egyptian
(_Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellschaft_, 1892), and in 1894
he was able to write a little manual of Egyptian for beginners
(_Agyptische Grammatik_, 2nd ed., 1902), centring on the language of
the standard inscriptions of the Middle and New Kingdoms, but
accompanying the main sketch with references to earlier and later
forms. Of the work of Erman's pupils we may mention G. Steindorff's
little _Koptische Grammatik_ (1894, ed. 1904), improving greatly on
Stern's standard work in regard to phonology and the relationship of
Coptic forms to Egyptian, and K. Sethe's _Das