THE DECREE OF CANOPUS.* THE author of this little publication
has devoted his attention mainly to the subject of Egyptian antiquities, and is favourably known for the soberness and discrimination he has exhibited in a pursuit which seems to disturb the mental equilibrium of most of its votaries. In the hands of many Egyptologiers fancies become facts, conjectures are treated as evidence, until the outside world, perplexed by their confident assumption and equally confident contradiction of one another, or of their former selves, is tempted to follow the sceptical lead of Sir G. C. Lewis, and contemn their labours altogether. Mr. Sharpe, however, seems, if one who has no personal knowledge of hieroglyphics may judge from his method, to preserve his common-sense and appreciation of the rules of evidence, where it is so easy to lose them ; and he has rendered an important service to his favourite study by pub- lishing not merely his own conclusions, but the data on which they are founded, and so enabling professed Egyptian scholars to test them all, and everyone who cares for historical antiquities to see how far the method of deciphering these unknown tongues, as followed by one of its most trustworthy professors, is a certain and scientific one.
"The Decree of Canopus" is an inscription, found in 1866 by some German savants, and is merely a decree published by the Egyptian priests in the year 238 B.C., for the not very edifying purpose of appointing divine honours to be paid to the deceased infant child of Ptolemy Euergetes, the reigning king. Were the historical interest of this inscription the only point worth notice in it, Mr. Sharpe would probably never have pub- rushed it, and certainly we should not have reviewed it. For though it casts some little light on one or two intricate questions connected with the Egyptian calendar, yet we cannot believe that there are fifty persons alive who would attach much value to infor- mation on so utterly uninteresting a subject, even though it tends to,show that the Egyptian priests, nearly two centuries before Julius Cmsar's reform of the calendar, had made the wonderful discovery that since a given festival, held on a fixed day, came gradually to be held in winter instead of summer, there must be something wrong in their estimate of the length of the year. Of actual historical information there is literally none, nor is there very much that one could expect to learn. It suggests some reflections on the nature and value of Alexander's conquest of the East, to find, in a century from his accession, his successors deified in a regular and matter-of-course fashion. Such a practice is totally at variance with all Hellenic ideas, though congenial to the Oriental mind, whose one notion of government is despotism more or less tempered by rebellion. Indeed it is felt to be so alien to the entire Western mode of thought, that historians of the Roman Empire have, as it were instinctively, resorted to somewhat far-fetched explanations of the patent fact of emperor-worship. But it requires a rather enthusiastic faith in the Greek race to make one believe that Asia was ever truly Hellenized, that Alex- ander achieved anything more than to build a few great commer- cial towns, to spread a thin varnish of Greek civilization over fundamentally unchanged society, and to substitute for Persian satraps two or three dynasties—Greek in blood and speech, who rapidly became Oriental in habits and tone of thought. There is, however, nothing new in this respect in the Decree of Canopus ;- that on the famous Rosetta Stone, dated some forty years later, contains similar matter, with more information concerning the social and political state of Egypt. In fact, the inscription now * The Decree of Canopus, in Hieroglyphics and Greek, with Translations and an inexpianation of the Hieroglyphical Characters. By Samuel Sharpe, author of "The History of Egypt." London : J. E. Smith. 1870.
laid before us by Mr. Sharpe may be described as a fresh Rosetta Stone, rather less valuable in its matter, much less so in that it is written in two characters instead of three, and more so in that it is in perfect preservation, whereas the inscription on the Rosetta Stone is considerably injured in parts. And Mr. Sharpe does not hesitate to say that it would have given the requisite clue to the meaning of hieroglyphics, had the Rosetta Stone never been found.
The Decree of Canopus was inscribed on a limestone tablet, and contains thirty-five lines of hieroglyphical writing, followed by seventy-five lines of Greek, the one being a translation of the other. By comparison with a fragment of a tablet now in the Louvre, which contained the same decree, though so much muti- lated that very little of it can be read, it is inferred that the Greek was the original, the hieroglyphics the translation, whereas on the Rosetta Stone we believe that the Greek was the transla- tion. This is fortunate, as Mr. Sharpe points out, for" the conse- quence is, that in the hieroglyphics of this decree the thoughts are expressed at far greater length, that is, with the help of a far greater number of words, than in the hieroglyphics of the Rosetta Stone. The Egyptian scribe, in his wish to express accurately the meaning of the more exact language, was forced to use a greater number of auxiliary verbs, and of inflections to his verbs, than we meet with on the Rosetta Stone, or is common in other in- scriptions." Hence, of course, a larger number of characters can be ascertained, with some approach to certainty, though the want of the third version which is given on the Rosetta Stone, in the same language with the hieroglyphics, but in the enohorial or common characters, which are of a distinctly alphabetic nature, must have been severely felt, especially as Mr. Sharpe lays much stress on comparison with the Coptic language, which is essentially the same with that of the hieroglyphics, though differing to the extent implied by the Coptic, as we have it, hav- ing been the tongue of Egypt four centuries or more later. Mr. Sharpe, indeed, does not pretend to arrive at certainty ; his version differs in important respects from those published by the discoverers, one at Vienna and one at Berlin ; but the very can- dour and clearness with which he expounds his uncertainties, and the means by which he may have been led into error, make one ready to trust him where he feels no doubt. It is only necessary, however, to glance through the pages in which he explains the hieroglyphics, word by word, to see how far we still are from being able to read them with any precision. The language was, at best, a rude one, possessing very little of the grammatical rich- ness of the Aryan tongues, and consequently the difficulty of trans- lation is greatly enhanced by the want of any means of discriminat- ing accurately tenses, cases, &e. : and even had the language been more perfect, it was written in a method which may be described as a compromise between mere picture-writing and an alphabetical system, possessing some of the characteristics of each, as well as many of the arbitrary symbols which make the transition from one to the other. To the acuteness and perseverance of Dr. Young and M. Champollion, who succeeded in discovering the mode of deciphering the inscription on the Rosetta Stone, we owe all that has yet been done in the way of reading hieroglyphics ; and the method which they devised, and other labourers in the same field have made practical, will doubtless ultimately lead to all the hieroglyphic writings extant being deciphered as com- pletely as is possible in the face of the linguistic difficulties above referred to. Still, we are a long way off this desirable consummation at present, as Mr. Sharpe would doubtless be the first to allow, and though, as he points out in his introduction, the names of the kings are for various reasons among the best ascertained words of all which the hieroglyphic inscriptions contain, yet even these are not very accurately determined. We may some day have a history of Egypt, the one country in the world which has preserved some sort of civilization, though varying in type, from the very earliest ages down to our own era, but the chances are against it. The manner in which the Egyptian priests humbugged Herodotus does not give give us a very exalted idea of their regard for truth, or instil much confidence in the veracity of their inscriptions. Moreover, there seems no possibility of dis- covering the exact meaning of scribes who use tenses and preposi- tions so loosely ; and we shall have probably to be content with the mere dry bones of history. But it may safely be predicted that if we ever do attain to more complete knowledge of the departed nations, whose memorials are found in the cuneiform and hieroglyphic inscriptions, the result will be due not to the card- house buildings of speculative writers, but to the patient labours of scholars like Champollion and Mr. Sharpe.
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