Edward Dolnick

Egyptian hieroglyphs lay undecipherable until the Rosetta Stone was found by Napoleon’s army in 1799. In 1801, the Treaty of Alexandra signed by French. British, and Egyptian generals, and among the agreed upon terms certain artifacts were to be taken to London. One of those artifacts was the Rosetta Stone. The secret to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs was solved by the presence of a government decree written on the stone in three languages; Ancient Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. When the stone arrived at the British Museum in 1802, the world was agog with scholars who set themselves to the task of decipherment. No one could agree if the hieroglyphics were ideographs (pictures representing idea or actions), letters of an alphabet, or individual words. Thomas Young in England and François Champollion in France ultimately rose to the top with the later being the ultimate victor. The first step seemed easy enough; translate the Ancient Greek which scholars already knew how to read, then translate the demotic (an already known everyday version of hieroglyphs), then match the unknown hieroglyph to the known language. -Champollion stated, “It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word.” It is a fascinating read.… (meer)