How the Hieroglyphics were decodified?
- Europeans were missing a key piece of the puzzle and had been for 2 000 years. They had been trying to figure out how to read hieroglyphics for centuries but the only instructions on how to do so came from ancient Greek and Roman writers who insisted that they were ideographies using pictures to indicate concepts. While that was true sometimes they could also be phonetic indicating sounds the same way as alphabetic languages do. This misunderstanding was inherited all the way to the 1800s.
- Medieval Muslim researchers tried to crack the code and failed though two did discover that some of the code lined up with Coptic, a descendant of ancient Egyptian. Later when Renaissance alchemists attempted to read the texts hoping to learn ancient spells, healing practices and other wonders, they had even less luck.
- It wasn't in until 1814 that an English polymath named Thomas Young made the first real progress. Young, a medical doctor, scientist and linguist at first just busied himself with translating the Demonic section of the Rosetta Stone. However, after a conversation with another researcher (who suggested that the ptolemies being Greek might have written their names phonetically in hieroglyphics) he decided to jump sections. He reasoned that finding the Royal name should be easy enough since it had been suggested that they were always in a circle that we now know as a Cartouche and sure enough he found the name Ptolemy. Upon further study, Young found 80 similarities between the hieroglyphic section of the stone and the Demonic one.
- Young's work stalled as he incorrectly assumed that hieroglyphics were logographic symbols with each symbol representing a word (like Chinese or Japanese) and that only the Greek names would have phonetic equivalents.
In comes Jean Francois Champollion!
- Champollion had been attempting to translate hieroglyphics from his knowlege of Copic and Demotic believing that they were in fact phonetic. However, being in France he had to work off print copies of the stone and probably never got to see the actual Rosetta Stone.
- champollion used his earlier work on demonic and knowledge of Coptic to reconstruct theoretical cartouches of common Egyptian royal names> His hope was that these cartouches, should he find them in inscriptions, would gradually unlock more hieroglyphic characters. This he did while also feuding with rivals and periodically going into exile for his continued support of Napoleon.
- Then when Banks (see below about Banks) sent him a print of the inscriptions on his Obelisk champollion stopped dead. There on the side was his reconstruction of Cleopatra! He went into a feverish blitz of work and began to realize that Egyptian hieroglyphics were a mix of ideographic and phonetic characters.
- It was i 1822 when it all clicked. He read the name Thutmose from an imported inscription, then checked it against the Rosetta Stone. He then bolted from his desk ran down the street to his brother's house and supposedly screamed "I've got it" before collapsing in a dramatic faint.
- In1829 he fulfilled his lifelong dream of traveling to Egypt. Once there, he found a vanished world beginning to speak to him. Using his dictionary and grammar system, he read the words of Gods and Priests off the temple walls. He uncovered Kings whose names had not been spoken in a millennia and in the Papyrus Scrolls preserved in the Arid deserts of Upper Egypt he found the words of the common people even though he'd never laid eyes on it.
About Banks mentioned above
John Banks was touring Egypt when he fell in love with a 22 foot tall six-ton Obelisk and decided that it would look great in front of his yard as it also had inscriptions in hieroglyphics and Greek. He hoped it would be a second Rosetta Stone. So he did what anyone would do: hired an Italian circus strongman to coordinate hauling it back to his estate in England.
