Page 54 - BV2

Since the problem was claimed to have been solved in word-values themselves have passed out of the written
1822, the decipherment system has remained more or language."
less moribund, despite enormous advances being made
in every other field of science. The absence of records This is an astonishing admission, as Wallis-Budge is
of biblical characters from the hieroglyphic records of clearly saying that there were -- he guesses -- words
Egypt must have bewildered millions during the 175 which have vanished and which have been replaced by
years since decipherment was said to be possible. This quite different words. In this context an "Owl" hiero-
fact alone should have alerted scholars that something glyph could maybe give any other letter than "M" de-
was not right -- but since the Darwinian revolution of rived from "mulotch." It may be "A, B, C, D...L, M,
the 1860s, the biblical texts have been subject to the N...W, Y," in fact anything depending on the long lost
greatest critism, even to the point of doubting that unknown original word.
Moses was ever in Egypt. On this, the record can now
be set to rights -- and much else besides. If an ancient inscription were dug up in, say France,
would it be legitimate to try to read it in an amalgam of
With no one to challenge the "experts" until now, there mixed Hebrew, Greek and Assyrian? The only question
has not been any advance since the 32-year-old that should actually arise is "Which language is it?" The
Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832), notion that hieroglyphs were written in a mixture of
put out his theory in 1822. The fact is, he barely Coptic, Hebrew and Aramaic and that words in Coptic
scratched the surface of things but in so doing sent have themselves changed beyond all recognition is
scholars into a dead-end study. nonsense. Either the hieroglyphs were written in Cop-
tic or they were not. It is that simple. Research is
The theory that the dead language of the Egyptian Cop- showing that the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt were
tic Christians was the ancient popular language of the not written in Coptic with recourse to Hebrew and
Egyptians, was first put forward by Athanasius Kircher Aramaic -- and that is why there is chronological chaos
in 1643. Champollion pursued this theory, being fa- in the disorder of ancient history.
miliar with both Greek and Coptic -- he was thus pre-
convinced that Coptic was the language of the hiero- This brings us to the words of the perplexed T.G.H.
glyphs. In the event, his method was not to translate at James, former keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the
all, but to look merely for comparisons. British Museum, who, when commenting on Champol-
lion's "decipherment system" wrote:
The cracks in Champollion's edifice have been evident
for a long time. E.A. Wallis-Budge, who studied hiero- "So cumbrous and illogical does this multiplicity of
glyphic decipherment in depth, noted that only around Signs seem, that it is hard to understand the process of
100 words were identifiable as Coptic in the proposed thought by which it was evolved, and even more diffi-
translation of the hieroglyphs. In 1910 Wallis-Budge, cult to imagine why it should have continued with so
in dealing with the Coptic, wrote: little development over so long a period of time."

"In the same way the other letters of the Egyptian Al- Further perplexed by the claims of Champollion
phabet were derived, though it is not always possible to that the hieroglyphs were based on Coptic, James
say what the word-value of a character was originally."
again put his finger on the problem without perhaps re-
alizing the immensity of what can only be described as
This means that the hieroglyph of an "Owl" is given the a fraud, when he wrote:
value of "M" simply because the Coptic word for Owl
is "mulotch" beginning with "M," but the original word "The method had however its limitations both because
might have been something else. It gets very much the Egyptian words which had been preserved in Coptic
worse as Wallis-Budge confirms:
were few in comparison with the immense Hiero-
glyphic vocabulary, and because many words had de-
"In many cases it is not easy to find the word-values of veloped so far from their forms in earlier times as to
an alphabet sign even by reference to Coptic, a fact be difficult to recognize as derivatives...When Coptic
which seems to indicate that the alphabet characters could offer no assistance in interpreting a word, it was
were developed from word-values so long ago that the necessary to resort to either a deduction...or to
Hebrew."

54