It is only by the most careful scrutiny, or the exercise of the most piercing insight, that the imperfectly spelled Egyptian has been made to yield up one grammatical secret after another in the light brought to bear upon it from Coptic. Demotic grammar ought soon to be thoroughly comprehensible in its forms, and the study of Late Egyptian should not stand far behind that of demotic. On the other hand, Middle Egyptian, and still mote Old Egyptian, which is separated from Middle Egyptian by a wide gap, will perhaps always be to us little more than consonantal skeletons, the flesh and blood of their vocalization being for the most part irretrievably lost.
A distinctively late Egyptian use of glass was for weights and vase-stamps, to receive an impress stating the amount of the weight or measure.
Not content with this, we find the late Egyptian astrologers setting up a correspondence between the thirty-six decani recognized by them and the human body, which is thus divided into thirty-six parts; to each part a god was assigned as a controlling force.
At this point a papyrus of stories written in the popular language of the Middle Kingdom provided Erman with a stepping-stone from Old Egyptian to the Late Egyptian of the Neuagyptische Grammatik, and gave the connections that would bind solidly together the whole structtire of Egyptian grammar (see Sprache des Papyrus Westcar, 1889).
