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HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING
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of mighty potentates and powerful empires for ages after they had passed away. Its decipherment is one of the romantic achievements of modern science, and a fine example also of international scholarship. No results rewarded the attempted decipherments of the savants of the sixteenth century, that is the Italians G. P. Valeriano (1556) and M. Mercati (1589),
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Fig. 35-The "Rosetta Stone"
and of the seventeenth century with the learned Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, but in the eighteenth century Warburton guessed the existence of "alphabetic" characters, and De Guignes guessed that some of the signs
