September 27, 1822: Jean-François Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta stone. He was a poor young student about age nine when the stone was discovered. He had become a troublemaker when he grew up, and his brother encouraged him to study these ancient Egyptian texts to occupy his time. He deciphered hieroglyphics using the Rosetta Stone at age 19 and was immediately proclaimed a university professor. Napoleon invaded Egypt (1798-1799) and during that invasion took a tremendous interest in ancient Egyptian culture which almost completely unknown in his day. He had scientists locate artifacts, produce temple drawings, retrieve documents, and more to later be studied. His troops occupied the Egyptian town of Rosetta in 1799, where they found an extremely important artifact – the Rosetta Stone. This discovery by the French under Napoleon became the key to unlocking ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. It contains the coronation decree of Ptolemy V on March 27, 196 BCE. It contains three different writing systems. The bottom portion is in ancient Greek, and in 1799 any educated person would be able to read it having studied both Greek and Latin. Part of the very bottom of that Greek portion was the sentence, “Inscribe this decree in hard stone using sacred, native and Greek writing.” This bottom portion was obviously Greek, the top portion the sacred hieroglyphic, and the middle native Demotic (cursive hieroglyphic). The key then became relating the known Greek script to the unknown hieroglyphic and demotic scripts. Finding such a trilingual inscription made this possible. The way Champollion accomplished this was interesting. The right assumptions had to be made when certain portions weren’t comparable to others. He assumed some of the symbols must have been phonetic – representing sounds. A picture of a snake could represent a distinct sound rather than an actual snake. Champollion realized that writing a Greek name in hieroglyphic would have to be phonetically represented as the Egyptians would have not comparable word for a Greek person’s name. They would have to replicate the sound, not the letters. The name Frank is a snake above a plate, a bird, a plate with arrows above it, and a man kneeling and pointing to them indicating a man’s name. Because of the Greek text, the stone was known to commemorate the coronation of Ptolemy V. Thus he knew that somewhere in the hieroglyphs would be representations of the sound of Ptolemy’s name as opposed to actual letter representations. Locating it was the challenge. Hieroglyphic could be written right to left, left to right, or top to bottom (never bottom to top). An animal looking in a direction indicated that as the starting direction. Each individual hieroglyph was always read top-bottom-right-left. It was noticed that some words were encased in a cartouche – a cartridge/loop outline shape. The assumption was that the name of the king (being a divine pharaoh) must be set aside and this must be his name. Sometimes other hieroglyphs would be added to the end of a name as an honorific for an accomplishment or status, such as “honoring Ptah.” Once Champollion guessed the hieroglyphs within the cartouche always represented the sounds in Ptolemy’s name, he could look at other name inscription on other stones and documents with some of the same sounds (e.g., Cleopatra). Some symbols represented two or even three (triliteral) sounds. Champollion made this breakthrough in 1822 and died ten years later at the age of 41, and he never saw the actual Rosetta Stone! We can confirm the accuracy because the thousands of documents and other writings in hieroglyphic make sense this way and this way only, though there are still problematic areas. His grave in Paris is marked by an Egyptian obelisk.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 07:30:14 +0000
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