Rosetta Stone stela as it may have originally appeared, with all three registers intact When French forces under
Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, Bonaparte brought with him a
corps of scientists and scholars, generally known as the
savants, to study the land and its ancient monuments. In July 1799, when French soldiers were rebuilding a
Mamluk fort near the town of
Rosetta that they had dubbed
Fort Julien, Lieutenant
Pierre-François Bouchard noticed that one of the stones from a demolished wall in the fort was covered with writing. It was an ancient Egyptian
stela, divided into three registers of text, with its lower right corner and most of its upper register broken off. The stone was inscribed with three scripts: hieroglyphs in the top register, Greek at the bottom and
demotic in the middle. The text was a
decree issued in 197BC by
Ptolemy V, granting favours to Egypt's priesthoods. 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. Upon reading this passage in the Greek inscription the French realised the stone was a
parallel text, which could allow the Egyptian text to be deciphered based on its Greek translation. The savants eagerly sought other fragments of the stela as well as other texts in Greek and Egyptian. No further pieces of the stone were ever found, and the only other bilingual texts the savants discovered were largely illegible and useless for decipherment. The savants did make some progress with the stone itself.
Jean-Joseph Marcel said the middle script was "cursive characters of the ancient Egyptian language", identical to others he had seen on papyrus scrolls. He and Louis Rémi Raige began comparing the text of this register with the Greek one, reasoning that the middle register would be more fruitful than the hieroglyphic text, most of which was missing. They guessed at the positions of proper names in the middle register, based on the position of those names in the Greek text, and managed to identify the
p and
t in the name of Ptolemy, but they made no further progress. The first copies of the stone's inscriptions were sent to France in 1800. In 1801 the French army in Egypt was besieged by British and
Ottoman forces and surrendered in the
Capitulation of Alexandria. By its terms, the Rosetta Stone passed to the British. Upon the stone's arrival in Britain, the
Society of Antiquaries of London made engravings of its text and sent them to academic institutions across Europe. Reports from Napoleon's expedition spurred
a mania for ancient Egypt in Europe. Egypt was chaotic in the wake of the French and British withdrawal, but after
Muhammad Ali took control of the country in 1805, European collectors descended on Egypt and carried away numerous antiquities, while artists copied others. No one knew these artefacts' historical context, but they contributed to the corpus of texts that scholars could compare when trying to decipher the writing systems.
De Sacy, Åkerblad and Young Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, a prominent French linguist who had deciphered the Persian
Pahlavi script in 1787, was among the first to work on the stone. Like Marcel and Raige he concentrated on relating the Greek text to the demotic script in the middle register. Based on Plutarch he assumed this script consisted of 25 phonetic signs. De Sacy looked for Greek proper names within the demotic text and attempted to identify the phonetic signs within them, but beyond identifying the names of Ptolemy, Alexander and Arsinoe he made little progress. He realised that there were far more than 25 signs in demotic and that the demotic inscription was probably not a close translation of the Greek one, thus making the task more difficult. After publishing his results in 1802 he ceased working on the stone. 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. Åkerblad had greater success, analysing the same sign-groups as de Sacy but identifying more signs correctly. In his letters to de Sacy Åkerblad proposed an alphabet of 29 demotic signs, half of which were later proven correct, and based on his knowledge of Coptic identified several demotic words within the text. De Sacy was sceptical of his results, and Åkerblad too gave up. Despite attempts by other scholars, little further progress was made until more than a decade later, when
Thomas Young entered the field. in 1822, by
Henry Perronet Briggs Young was a British
polymath whose fields of expertise included physics, medicine and linguistics. By the time he turned his attention to Egypt he was regarded as one of the foremost intellectuals of the day. In 1814 he began corresponding with de Sacy about the Rosetta Stone, and after some months he produced what he called translations of the hieroglyphic and demotic texts of the stone. They were in fact attempts to break the texts down into groups of signs to find areas where the Egyptian text was most likely to closely match the Greek. This approach was of limited use because the three texts were not exact translations of each other. Young spent months copying other Egyptian texts, which enabled him to see patterns in them that others missed. Like Zoëga, he recognised that there were too few hieroglyphs for each to represent one word, and he suggested that words were composed of two or three hieroglyphs each. Young noticed the similarities between hieroglyphic and demotic signs and concluded that the hieroglyphic signs had evolved into the demotic ones. 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. Although he hoped to find phonetic signs in the hieroglyphic script, he was thwarted by the wide variety of phonetic spellings the script used. He concluded that phonetic hieroglyphs did not exist—with a major exception. In his 1802 publication de Sacy had said hieroglyphs might function phonetically when writing foreign words. In 1811 he suggested, after learning about a similar practice in Chinese writing, that a cartouche signified a word written phonetically—such as the name of a non-Egyptian ruler like Ptolemy. Young applied these suggestions to the cartouches on the Rosetta Stone. Some were short, consisting of eight signs, while others contained those same signs followed by many more. 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". Therefore, he concentrated on the first eight signs, which should correspond to the Greek form of the name,
Ptolemaios. Adopting some of the phonetic values proposed by Åkerblad, Young matched the eight hieroglyphs to their demotic equivalents and proposed that some signs represented several phonetic values while others stood for just one. He then attempted to apply the results to a cartouche of Berenice, the name of a Ptolemaic queen, with less success, although he did identify a pair of hieroglyphs that marked the ending of a feminine name. The result was a set of thirteen phonetic values for hieroglyphic and demotic signs. Six were correct, three partly correct, and four wrong. Young summarised his work in his article "Egypt", published anonymously in a supplement to the
Encyclopædia Britannica in 1819. It gave conjectural translations for 218 words in demotic and 200 in hieroglyphic and correctly correlated about 80 hieroglyphic signs with demotic equivalents. 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." Yet Young was less interested in ancient Egyptian texts themselves than in the writing systems as an intellectual puzzle, and his multiple scientific interests made it difficult for him to concentrate on decipherment. He achieved little more on the subject in the next few years.
Champollion's breakthroughs 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. 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. 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. As late as 1821 he believed that none of the scripts were phonetic. In the following years, however, he surged ahead. The details of how he did so cannot be fully determined because of gaps in the evidence and conflicts in the contemporary accounts. Champollion was initially dismissive of Young's work, having seen only excerpts from Young's list of hieroglyphic and demotic words. After moving to Paris from
Grenoble in mid-1821 he would have been able to obtain a full copy, but it is not known whether he did so. It was about this time that he turned his attention to identifying phonetic sounds within cartouches. A crucial clue came from the
Philae Obelisk, an obelisk bearing both a Greek and an Egyptian inscription.
William John Bankes, an English antiquities collector, shipped the obelisk from Egypt to England and copied its inscriptions. These inscriptions were not a single bilingual text like that of the Rosetta Stone, as Bankes assumed, but both inscriptions contained the names "Ptolemy" and "
Cleopatra", the hieroglyphic versions being enclosed by cartouches. The Ptolemy cartouche was identifiable based on the Rosetta Stone, but Bankes could only guess based on the Greek text that the second represented Cleopatra's name. His copy of the text suggested this reading of the cartouche in pencil. Champollion, who saw the copy in January 1822, treated the cartouche as that of Cleopatra but never stated how he identified it; he could have done so in more than one way, given the evidence available to him. Bankes angrily assumed Champollion had taken his suggestion without giving credit and refused to give him any further help. Champollion broke down the hieroglyphs in Ptolemy's name differently from Young and found that three of his conjectured phonetic signs—
p,
l and
o—fitted into Cleopatra's cartouche. A fourth,
e, was represented by a single hieroglyph in Cleopatra's cartouche and a doubled version of the same glyph in Ptolemy's cartouche. A fifth sound,
t, seemed to be written with different signs in each cartouche, but Champollion decided these signs must be
homophones, different signs spelling the same sound. He proceeded to test these letters in other cartouches, identifying the names of many Greek and Roman rulers of Egypt and extrapolating the values of more letters still. In July Champollion rebutted an analysis by
Jean-Baptiste Biot of the text surrounding an Egyptian temple relief known as the
Dendera Zodiac. In doing so he pointed out that hieroglyphs of stars in this text seemed to indicate that the nearby words referred to something related to stars, such as constellations. He called the signs used in this way "signs of the type", although he would later dub them "determinatives". Champollion announced his proposed readings of the Greco-Roman cartouches in his
Lettre à M. Dacier, which he completed on 22 September 1822. He read it to the Académie on 27 September, with Young among the audience. This letter is often regarded as the founding document of Egyptology, although it represented only a modest advance over Young's work. Yet it ended by suggesting, without elaboration, that phonetic signs might have been used in writing proper names from a very early point in Egyptian history. How Champollion reached this conclusion is mostly not recorded in contemporary sources. His own writings suggest that one of the keys was his conclusion that the
Abydos King List contained the name "
Ramesses", a royal name found in the works of Manetho, and that some of his other evidence came from copies of inscriptions in Egypt made by
Jean-Nicolas Huyot. According to
Hermine Hartleben, who wrote the most extensive biography of Champollion in 1906, the breakthrough came on 14 September 1822, a few days before the
Lettre was written, when Champollion was examining Huyot's copies. One cartouche from
Abu Simbel contained four hieroglyphic signs. Champollion guessed, or drew on the same guess found in Young's
Britannica article, that the circular first sign represented the sun. The Coptic word for "sun" was
re. The sign that appeared twice at the end of the cartouche stood for "s" in the cartouche of Ptolemy. If the name in the cartouche began with
Re and ended with
ss, it might thus match "Ramesses", suggesting the sign in the middle stood for
m. Further confirmation came from the Rosetta Stone, where the
m and
s signs appeared together at a point corresponding to the word for "birth" in the Greek text, and from Coptic, in which the word for "birth" was
mise. Another cartouche contained three signs, two of them the same as in the Ramesses cartouche. The first sign, an
ibis, was a known symbol of the god
Thoth. If the latter two signs had the same values as in the Ramesses cartouche, the name in the second cartouche would be
Thothmes, corresponding to the royal name "
Tuthmosis" mentioned by Manetho. These were native Egyptian kings, well predating Greek rule in Egypt, yet the writing of their names was partially phonetic. Now Champollion turned to the title of Ptolemy found in the longer cartouches in the Rosetta Stone. Champollion knew the Coptic words that would translate the Greek text and could tell that phonetic hieroglyphs such as
p and
t would fit these words. From there he could guess the phonetic meanings of several more signs. By Hartleben's account, upon making these discoveries Champollion raced to his brother's office at the Académie des Inscriptions, flung down a collection of copied inscriptions, cried "
Je tiens mon affaire!" ("I've done it!") and collapsed in a days-long faint. spellings of the name of
Xerxes I on the
Caylus vase, copied in
Précis du système hiéroglyphique Over the next few months Champollion applied his hieroglyphic alphabet to many Egyptian inscriptions, identifying dozens of royal names and titles. During this period Champollion and the orientalist
Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin examined the
Caylus vase, which bore a hieroglyphic cartouche as well as text in
Persian cuneiform. 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. This was a major step in the
decipherment of cuneiform. Around this time Champollion made a second breakthrough. Although he counted about 860 hieroglyphic signs, a handful of those signs made up a large proportion of any given text. He also came upon a recent study of Chinese by
Abel Rémusat, which showed that even Chinese writing used phonetic characters extensively, and that its ideographic signs had to be combined into many
ligatures to form a full vocabulary. Few hieroglyphs seemed to be ligatures. Champollion had identified the name of
Antinous, a non-royal Roman, written in hieroglyphs with no cartouche, next to characters that seemed to be ideographic. Phonetic signs were thus not limited to cartouches. To test his suspicions, Champollion compared hieroglyphic texts that seemed to contain the same content and noted discrepancies in spelling, which indicated the presence of homophones. He compared the resulting list of homophones with the table of phonetic signs from his work on the cartouches and found they matched. Champollion announced these discoveries to the Académie des Inscriptions in April 1823. From there he progressed rapidly in identifying new signs and words. He concluded the phonetic signs made up a
consonantal alphabet in which vowels were only sometimes written. 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." The
Précis identified hundreds of hieroglyphic words, described differences between hieroglyphs and other scripts, analysed proper names and the uses of cartouches and described some of the language's grammar. Champollion was moving from deciphering a script to translating the underlying language.
Disputes The
Lettre à M. Dacier mentioned Young as having worked on demotic and referred to Young's attempt to decipher the name of Berenice, but it did not mention Young's breakdown of Ptolemy's name nor that the feminine name-ending, which was also found in Cleopatra's name on the Philae Obelisk, had been Young's discovery. Believing that these discoveries had made Champollion's progress possible, Young expected to receive much of the credit for whatever Champollion ultimately produced. 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 1823 Young published a book on his Egyptian work,
An Account of Some Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphical Literature and Egyptian Antiquities, and responded to Champollion's slight in the subtitle: "Including the Author's Original Hieroglyphic Alphabet, As Extended by Mr Champollion". Champollion angrily responded, "I shall never consent to recognise any other original alphabet than my own, where it is a matter of the hieroglyphic alphabet properly called". The
Précis in the following year acknowledged Young's work, but in it Champollion said he had arrived at his conclusions independently, without seeing Young's
Britannica article. Scholarly opinion ever since has been divided on whether Champollion was being truthful. Young would continue to push for greater acknowledgement, while expressing a mixture of admiration of Champollion's work and scepticism of some of his conclusions. Relations between them varied between cordial and contentious until Young's death in 1829. As he continued to work on hieroglyphs, making mistakes alongside many successes, Champollion was embroiled in a related dispute, with scholars who rejected the validity of his work. Among them were
Edme Jomard, a veteran of Napoleon's expedition, and
Heinrich Julius Klaproth, a German orientalist. Some championed Young at the same time. The scholar who held out longest against Champollion's decipherment was
Gustav Seyffarth. His opposition to Champollion culminated in a public argument with him in 1826, and he continued to advocate his own approach to hieroglyphs until his death in 1885. As the nature of hieroglyphs became clearer, detractors of this kind fell away, but the debate over how much Champollion owed to Young continues. Nationalist rivalry between the English and French exacerbates the issue. Egyptologists are often reluctant to criticise Champollion, who is regarded as the founder of their discipline, and by extension can be reluctant to credit Young. The Egyptologist
Richard Parkinson takes a moderate position: "Even if one allows that Champollion was more familiar with Young's initial work than he subsequently claimed, he remains the decipherer of the hieroglyphic script… Young discovered parts of an alphabet—a key—but Champollion unlocked an entire language." ==Reading texts==