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Decipherment of Hieroglyphs
As Christianity gradually spread through Egypt,
knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language written in hieroglyphs,
hieratic, and demotic disappeared, and the key to understanding it
was lost. Over the centuries scholars theorized about the nature of
the language but reached the erroneous conclusion that the
hieroglyphic signs still visible on the temple walls must have had a
purely symbolic function and reflected mystical doctrines. It was
not realized that the hieroglyphs conveyed a language with its own
grammar and vocabulary. After the Renaissance, as travelers again
began to visit Egypt, interest in hieroglyphs was revived and Coptic
manuscripts began to be imported into Europe. Some advances were now
being made in the study of Coptic, particularly by Athanasius
Kircher (1643). Although there had been earlier theories about the
nature and meaning of hieroglyphs (the Greek writers Horapollo and
Chaeremon were among the first), it was Kircher who became the
best-known exponent of the symbolic theory of hieroglyphs.
Unfortunately, his attempts to decipher and read hieroglyphs (found
on the obelisks that had been removed from Egypt to Rome and
elsewhere during the period of Roman rule) added nothing to further
the study, since he continued to regard the individual hieroglyphs
as symbols.
The Rosetta Stone A new era began when the Rosetta Stone was discovered in the Nile Delta during Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. In 1799, as the French were gathering stones to strengthen the ramparts for their coastal defenses against the British navy, the officer in charge of the exercise, Lieutenant Pierre François Xavier Bouchard, was shown a stone inscribed with three horizontal panels of text. Realizing it might be of importance he sent it to the institute that Napoleon had founded in Cairo. As it turned out, the impact of the Rosetta Stone on the decipherment of hieroglyphs was crucial. This black basalt stone carried an inscription in three scripts Greek, hieroglyphs, and demotic. Scholars soon realized that the three texts contained the same content. Since the section in Greek could be understood and readily translated the stone provided an unparalleled opportunity to attempt a decipherment of the hieroglyphs and demotic. Translation of the Greek showed that the text was a decree by the priesthoods of Egypt in honor of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes (196 BC) issued in Greek, the official language of Egypt; hieroglyphs, the ancient sacred writing; and demotic, used as a legal and business script. Originally set up in Memphis, the stone had been moved to Rosetta on the Delta coast at an unknown period. As a condition of the British success over French troops in Egypt, the Rosetta Stone was ceded to Britain in 1801 and was brought to England, where it was placed in the British Museum as a gift from King George III. Initial attempts to decipher the hieroglyphs and demotic on the Rosetta Stone were unsuccessful, since the scholars still attempted to use the old symbolic theory. Some progress was made by Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), who declared, in 1802, that certain sign groups in the demotic corresponding to the names of Ptolemy and Alexander could be readily identified in the Greek. Johan David Akerblad also made significant steps toward the decipherment of the demotic text, which he set out in his Lettre à M. de Sacy (1802). However, it was the work of Thomas Young and then Champollion that enabled the hieroglyphs to be deciphered. Thomas Young was an English physician and physicist with wide-ranging interest. He made several important discoveries regarding the Egyptian texts. First, he recognized that some demotic characters as well as linear hieroglyphs and hieratic, were derived from hieroglyphs. This was significant because it showed that demotic was not an entirely alphabetic script as Akerblad had claimed and it recognized for the first time that Egyptian texts used alphabetic and nonalphabetic signs alongside each other. He (and other scholars) also made the important claim that the Egyptians enclosed royal names in ovals (cartouches). Using the parallel Greek text he was able to identify the royal names of Ptolemy and Berenice (on another similar royal decree) and to attribute the sound values in those names to the hieroglyphic signs within the cartouches. He identified thirteen signs in these two names of which six were found to be correct, three were partly right, and four were wrong. This short list, however, enabled him to read the name of Ptolemy correctly in the hieroglyphs. He also correctly proposed a close relationship between hieroglyphs and Coptic; he began a comparison of Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphs; and he concluded that demotic was a cursive form of hieroglyphs. Young’s publication Remarks on Egyptian Papyri and on the Inscription of Rosetta (1815) set out his ideas on translating the demotic text on the Rosetta Stone. Financial problems and ill health led Young to withdraw from Egyptian studies, but his contribution to the decipherment of hieroglyphs was considerable, and it has been suggested that he did not receive due recognition for his work. Honor for achieving the breakthrough was eventually awarded to the French scholar Champollion. Jean-François Champollion, born in Figeac, France, was a prodigious child, and an early visit to the mathematician Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, who had been one of the scholars to accompany Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, may have inspired Champollion’s interest in hieroglyphs. He prepared himself for the task of decipherment by learning at least nine oriental languages before he was seventeen. Ultimately his studies were rewarded with success, and in 1831 the first chair in Egyptian history and archaeology was created for him at the Collège de France. At first he supported the theory that hieroglyphs were purely symbolic in purpose, as had been proposed by earlier scholars. He set out this view (which opposed Young’s claim that some signs were alphabetic) in his De l’écriture hiératique des anciens Égyptiens (1821), concluding that Egyptian was not alphabetic. However, he later adopted the alphabetic approach favored by Young and found that considerable progress could then be made in deciphering the royal names. A major turning point came in September 1822. He was studying copies of an inscription from the temple at Abu Simbel and, using the phonetic principles already established by Young and himself, he was able to identify the name of King Ramesses II. This made him realize that the Egyptians not only used hieroglyphs phonetically to write the names of foreign rulers such as Ptolemy and Berenice but also wrote the names of their own kings in the same way. Thus, for the first time, he understood that many hieroglyphs were in fact truly phonetic and not symbolic, and he set out his conclusions in his famous Lettre à M Dacier . . . relative à l’alphabet des hieroglyphes phonetiques (1822). This was a landmark in his research, but not all scholars accepted his ideas, and there also continued to be a dispute about the extent of his appropriation of Young’s initial discoveries. In 1824 Champollion published Précis du système hiéroglyphique, which showed that Egyptian combined both phonetic and ideographic signs. This breakthrough in understanding the writing system allowed Egyptian to be read and translated as readily as any other language. He formulated his major discoveries in such later works as Grammaire (1836–41) and Dictionnaire (1841–44); most scholars only acknowledged and accepted his system as a true analysis as late as 1837. Champollion’s discovery opened a new chapter in the historical study of ancient Egypt; henceforth, the literature as well as the architecture and artifacts could be properly studied. .
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Decipherment of Hieroglyphs
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