Sir E. A. Wallis Budge

“ The discovery of the correct alphabetic values of Egyptian signs was most useful for reading names, but for translating the Egyptian language a competent knowledge of Coptic was required. Now Coptic is only a name meaning “Egyptian.” The Egyptians who embraced Christianity after the preaching of Saint Mark at Alexandria are called “Copts,” and the translations of the Holy Scriptures, Liturgies, etc., which they made from Greek into their native Egyptian language soon after their conversion to Christianity, are said to be written in “Coptic.” ”

“ It was known by tradition and from Coptic Vocabularies that the old Egyptian word for “life” or “living,” was “ānkh,” or “ōnkh,” and that it was represented by the symbol which occurs several times in the inscriptions. It was therefore guessed that the next signs meant “ever.” The Coptic Vocabularies state that one of the old Egyptian words for “ever, age, eternity,” was Djet, and as we already know that the phonetic value of the second sign in the word is T, we may assume that the value of is DJ, or TJ. The third sign is a “determinative,” and was not pronounced. ”

“ Champollion, whilst still a youth in the early years of the nineteenth century, realized the great importance of Coptic for the purpose of Egyptian decipherment, and he studied it to such good purpose that he became an authority on the language and literature of the Copts. In his studies of the inscription on the Rosetta Stone, his knowledge of Coptic enabled him to deduce the phonetic values of many syllabic signs, and to assign correct readings to many pictorial characters, the meanings of which were made known to him by the Greek text on the Stone. ”