Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts

The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young.

Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the Coptic alphabet was increasingly used in their place.

Some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars in the Middle Ages and early modern times acknowledged the script might have a phonetic component, but perception of hieroglyphs as purely ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century.

The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799 by members of Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt, bore a parallel text in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek.

Plutarch, in the first century AD, referred to 25 Egyptian letters, suggesting he might have been aware of the phonetic aspect of hieroglyphic or demotic, but his meaning is unclear.

Plotinus, in the third century AD, claimed hieroglyphs did not represent words but a divinely inspired, fundamental insight into the nature of the objects they depicted.

[9] The only extensive discussion of hieroglyphs to survive into modern times was the Hieroglyphica, a work probably written in the fourth century AD and attributed to a man named Horapollo.

[18] Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya, in the ninth and tenth centuries, wrote treatises containing dozens of scripts known in the Islamic world, including hieroglyphs, with tables listing their meanings.

In the thirteenth or fourteenth century, Abu al-Qasim al-Iraqi copied an ancient Egyptian text and assigned phonetic values to several hieroglyphs.

[19] The Egyptologist Okasha El-Daly has argued that the tables of hieroglyphs in the works of Ibn Wahshiyya and Abu al-Qasim correctly identified the meaning of many of the signs.

[22][20] During the Renaissance Europeans became interested in hieroglyphs, beginning around 1422 when Cristoforo Buondelmonti discovered a copy of Horapollo's Hieroglyphica in Greece and brought it to the attention of antiquarians such as Niccolò de' Niccoli and Poggio Bracciolini.

[23] From this belief sprang a Renaissance artistic tradition of using obscure symbolism loosely based on the imagery described in Horapollo, pioneered by Francesco Colonna's 1499 book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

He guessed that Coptic was derived from the language of the ancient Egyptians, and his work on the subject was preparation for his ultimate goal, decipherment of the hieroglyphic script.

[40] William Warburton's religious treatise The Divine Legation of Moses, published from 1738 to 1741, included a long digression on hieroglyphs and the evolution of writing.

It argued that hieroglyphs were not invented to encode religious secrets but for practical purposes, like any other writing system, and that the phonetic Egyptian script mentioned by Clement of Alexandria was derived from them.

The text ended by calling for copies of the decree to be inscribed "in sacred, and native, and Greek characters" and set up in Egypt's major temples.

[62] In the same year de Sacy gave a copy of the stone's inscriptions to a former student of his, Johan David Åkerblad, a Swedish diplomat and amateur linguist.

If so, Young reasoned, demotic could not be a purely phonetic script but must also include ideographic signs that were derived from hieroglyphs; he wrote to de Sacy with this insight in 1815.

Young guessed that the long cartouches contained the Egyptian form of the title given to Ptolemy in the Greek inscription: "living for ever, beloved of [the god] Ptah".

[74] As the Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith put it in 1922, Young's results were "mixed up with many false conclusions, but the method pursued was infallibly leading to definite decipherment.

[76] Jean-François Champollion had developed a fascination with ancient Egypt in adolescence, between about 1803 and 1805, and he had studied Near Eastern languages, including Coptic, under de Sacy and others.

[77] His brother, Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, was an assistant to Bon-Joseph Dacier, the head of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, and in that position provided Jean-François with the means to keep up with research on Egypt.

[78] By the time Young was working on hieroglyphs Champollion had published a compendium of the established knowledge on ancient Egypt and assembled a Coptic dictionary, but though he wrote much on the subject of the undeciphered scripts, he was making no progress with them.

Saint-Martin, based on the earlier work of Georg Friedrich Grotefend, believed the cuneiform text to bear the name of Xerxes I, a king of the Achaemenid Empire in the fifth century BC whose realm included Egypt.

Champollion confirmed that the identifiable signs in the cartouche matched Xerxes's name, strengthening the evidence that phonetic hieroglyphs were used long before Greek rule in Egypt and supporting Saint-Martin's reading of the cuneiform text.

[101] A summary of his findings, published in 1824 as Précis du système hiéroglyphique, stated "Hieroglyphic writing is a complex system, a script all at once figurative, symbolic and phonetic, in one and the same text, in one and the same sentence, and, I might even venture, one and the same word."

In private correspondence shortly after the reading of the Lettre, Young quoted a French saying that meant "It's the first step that counts", although he also said "if [Champollion] did borrow an English key, the lock was so dreadfully rusty, that no common arm would have strength enough to turn it".

In the mid-1820s he was diverted by his other interests, but in 1827 he was spurred by a letter from an Italian scholar of Coptic, Amedeo Peyron, that said Young's habit of moving from one subject to another hampered his achievements and suggested he could accomplish much more if he concentrated on ancient Egypt.

[121] By reading the inscriptions on dozens of statues and stelae, Champollion became the first person in centuries to identify the kings who had commissioned them, although in some cases his identifications were incorrect.

[137] Lepsius's letter greatly strengthened the case for Champollion's general approach to hieroglyphs while correcting its deficiencies, and it definitively moved the focus of Egyptology from decipherment to translation.