; but at least he can distinguish fairly between a correct text
and a corrupt text. Egyptian writing lent itself only too easily to
misunderstanding, and the writings of one period were but half
intelligible to the learned scribes of another. The mistaken readings
of the old inscriptions by the priests at Abydos (Table of Abydos),
when attempting to record the names of the kings of the 1st Dynasty on
the walls of the temple of Seti I., are now admitted on all sides; and
no palaeographer, whether his field be Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian
or any other class of MSS., will be surprised to hear that the
Egyptian papyri and inscriptions abound in corruptions and mistakes.
The translator of to-day can, if he wishes, mark where certainty ends
and mere conjecture begins, and it is to be hoped that advantage will
be taken more widely of this new power. The Egyptologist who has long
lived in the realm of conjecture is too prone to consider any series
of guesses good enough to serve as a translation, and forgets to
insert the notes of interrogation which would warn workers in other
fields from implicit trust.

_Language and Writing._--The history of the Egyptian language is
evidenced by documents extending over a very long range of time. They
begin with the primitive inscriptions of the Ist Dynasty (not later than
3300 B.C.) and end with the latest Coptic compositions of about the 14th
century A.D. The bulk of the hieroglyphic inscriptions are written in a
more or less artificial literary language; but in business documents,
letters, popular tales, &c., the scribes often adhered closely to the
living form of the tongue, and thus reveal its progressive changes.

The stages of the language are now distinguished as follows:--

_Old Egyptian._--This is properly the language of the Old Kingdom. In it
we have (a) the recently discovered inscriptions of the Ist Dynasty, too
brief and concise to throw much light on the language of that time; and
the great collections of spells and ritual texts found inscribed in the
Pyramids of the Vth and VIth Dynasties, which must even then have been
of high antiquity, though they contain later additions made in the same
style. (b) A few historical texts and an abundance of short inscriptions
representing the language of the IVth, Vth and VIth Dynasties. The
ordinary _literary language_ of the later monuments is modelled on Old
Egyptian. It is often much affected by cont