After the conversion of the Egyptians to Christianity, the ancient mode of writing their language fell into disuse; and an alphabet was adopted in substitution, consisting of the twenty-five Greek letters, with six additional signs expressing articulations and aspirations unknown to the Greeks, the characters for which were retained from the demotic. This is the Coptic alphabet, in which the Egyptian appears as a written language in the Coptic books and manuscripts preserved in our libraries; and in which, consequently, the language of the inscriptions on the monuments may be studied. [p178]
The original mode in which the language was written having thus fallen into disuse, it happened, at length, that the signification of the characters, and even the nature of the system of writing which they formed, became entirely lost; such notices on the subject as existed in the early historians being either too imperfect, or appearing too vague, to furnish a clue, although frequently and carefully studied for the purpose. The repossession of this knowledge will form, in literary history, one of the most remarkable distinctions, if not the principal, of the age in which we live. It is due primarily to the discovery by the French, during their possession of Egypt, of the since well-known monument called the Rosetta Stone, which, on their defeat and expulsion by the British troops, remained in the hands of the victors, was conveyed to England, and deposited in the British Museum. On this monument the same inscription is repeated in the Greek and in the Egyptian language, being written in the latter both in hieroglyphics and in the demotic or enchorial character. The words Ptolemy and Cleopatra, written in hieroglyphics, and recognized by means of the corresponding Greek of the Rosetta inscription, and by a Greek inscription on the base of an obelisk at Philæ, gave the phonetic characters of the letters which form those words: by their means the names were discovered, in hieroglyphic writing, on other monuments of all the Grecian kings and Grecian queens of Egypt, and of fourteen of the Roman emperors ending with Commodus; and by the comparison of these names one with another, the value of all the phonetic characters was finally ascertained.