Stories of the High Priests of Memphis: The Dethon of Herodotus and the Demotic Tales of Khamuas (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Stories of the High Priests of Memphis: The Dethon of Herodotus and the Demotic Tales of Khamuas

In editing these demotic stories I have endeavoured to advance by a step that not insignificant branch of Egyptology which counts an Englishman, Thomas Young, among the chief founders of its study, but which since his time has been neglected entirely in this country. The decipherment of demotic, inaugurated by Akerblad's famous letter to De Sacy in 1802, and continued by Young and Champollion in 1820-1830, was most successfully cultivated by Heinrich Brugsch in the first half of his brilliant career, from 1847 to 1868, when he finished his dictionary of hieroglyphic and demotic. With such completeness did he triumph over the crabbed script that it remains for his successors only to perfect his work, at least for the later periods. Brugsch had for long been practically the sole reader of demotic when Revillout attacked the subject as a student of Coptic. By his multitudinous works the latter has certainly thrown light on the interpretation of the legal documents - some of which belong to the early period - and on the metrology. Demotic is, however, a subject which requires above all things care and accuracy if satisfactory results are to be obtained by the student.

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