Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts: Difference between revisions

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{{Short description|Research by J.-F. Champollion et al. in the 19th centurynone}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=July 2022}}

[[File:Portrait de Champollion Le Jeune par Madame de Rumilly cropped.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Refer to caption|[[Jean-François Champollion]] in 1823, holding his list of phonetic hieroglyphic signs. Portrait by {{ill|Victorine-Angélique-Amélie Rumilly|fr}}.]]

The [[writing system]]s used in [[ancient Egypt]] were [[decipherment|deciphered]] in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially [[Jean-François Champollion]] and [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]]. Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the [[hieroglyphic]], [[hieratic]] and [[demotic (Egyptian)|demotic]] scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the [[Coptic alphabet]] was increasingly used in their place. Later generations' knowledge of the older scripts was based on the work of [[Ancient Greece|Greek]] and [[Ancient Rome|Roman]] authors whose understanding was faulty. It was thus widely believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively [[ideographic]], representing ideas rather than sounds, and even that hieroglyphs were an esoteric, mystical script rather than a means of recording a spoken language. Some attempts at decipherment by [[Islamic science|Islamic]] and [[European science in the Middle Ages|European]] scholars in the [[Middle Ages]] and [[early modern times]] acknowledged the script might have a [[phonetic]] component, but perception of hieroglyphs as purely ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century.

The [[Rosetta Stone]], discovered in 1799 by members of [[Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt]], bore a [[parallel text]] in hieroglyphic, demotic and [[Ancient Greek|Greek]]. It was hoped that the Egyptian text could be deciphered through its Greek translation, especially in combination with the evidence from the [[Coptic language]], the last stage of the [[Egyptian language]]. Doing so proved difficult, despite halting progress made by [[Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy]] and [[Johan David Åkerblad]]. Young, building on their work, observed that demotic characters were derived from hieroglyphs and identified several of the phonetic signs in demotic. He also identified the meaning of many hieroglyphs, including phonetic [[glyphs]] in a [[cartouche]] containing the name of an Egyptian king of foreign origin, [[Ptolemy V]]. He was convinced, however, that phonetic hieroglyphs were used only in writing non-Egyptian words. In the early 1820s Champollion compared Ptolemy's cartouche with others and realised the hieroglyphic script was a mixture of phonetic and ideographic elements. His claims were initially met with scepticism and with accusations that he had taken ideas from Young without giving credit, but they gradually gained acceptance. Champollion went on to roughly identify the meanings of most phonetic hieroglyphs and establish much of the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Egyptian. Young, meanwhile, largely deciphered demotic using the Rosetta Stone in combination with other Greek and demotic parallel texts.

Decipherment efforts languished after Young's death in 1829 and Champollion's in 1832died, but in 1837 [[Karl Richard Lepsius]] pointed out that many hieroglyphs represented combinations of two or three sounds rather than one, thus correcting one of the most fundamental faults in Champollion's work. Other scholars, such as [[Emmanuel de Rougé]], refined the understanding of Egyptian enough that by the 1850s it was possible to fully translate ancient Egyptian texts. Combined with the [[decipherment of [[cuneiform]] at approximately the same time, their work opened up the once-inaccessible texts from the earliestearly stages of human history.

==Egyptian scripts and their extinction==

[[File:C+B-Egypt-Fig2-LetterDevelopment.PNG|thumb|right|alt=Table of signs with seven columns|Table showing the evolution of [[Egyptian hieroglyphs|hieroglyphic]] signs (left) through several stages of [[hieratic]] into [[demotic (Egyptian)|demotic]] (right)]]

For most of its history [[ancient Egypt]] had two major writing systems. [[Egyptian hieroglyphs|Hieroglyphs]], a system of pictorial signs used mainly for formal texts, originated sometime around 3200{{nbsp}}BC. [[Hieratic]], a [[cursive]] system derived from hieroglyphs that was used mainly for writing on [[papyrus]], was nearly as old. Beginning in the seventh century{{nbsp}}BC, a third script derived from hieratic, known today as [[Demotic (Egyptian)|demotic]], emerged. It differed so greatly from its hieroglyphic ancestor that the relationship between the signs is difficult to recognise.{{refn|The scholars who deciphered Egyptian differed on what to call this script. Thomas Young termed it "enchorial", based on the phrase referring to the script in the Greek text of the Rosetta Stone: ''ενχωριοις'', meaning "of the country", "vernacular",{{sfn|Buchwald|Josefowicz|2020|p=6}} or "native".{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|p=30}} Jean-François Champollion used Herodotus'sa term forfrom itthe [[Histories (Herodotus)|works]] of the Greek historian [[Herodotus]]: ''δημοτική'' or "demotic",{{sfn|Buchwald|Josefowicz|2020|p=120}} a Greek word meaning "in common use".{{sfn|Robinson|2006|p=151}} Champollion's term eventually became the conventional name.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|p=151}}|group="Note"}} Demotic became the most common system for writing the [[Egyptian language]], and hieroglyphic and hieratic were thereafter mostly restricted to religious uses. In the fourth century{{nbsp}}BC, Egypt came to be ruled by the Greek [[Ptolemaic dynasty]], and [[Ancient Greek|Greek]] and demotic were used side-by-side in Egypt under Ptolemaic rule and then that of the [[Roman Empire]]. Hieroglyphs became increasingly obscure, used mainly by Egyptian priests.{{sfn|Allen|2014|pp=1, 6–8}}

All three scripts contained a mix of [[phonogram (linguistics)|phonetic signs]], representing sounds in the spoken language, and [[ideographic]] signs, representing ideas. Phonetic signs included uniliteral, biliteral and triliteral signs, standing respectively for one, two or three sounds. Ideographic signs included [[logogram]]s, representing whole words, and [[determinative]]s, which were used to specify the meaning of a word written with phonetic signs.{{sfn|Loprieno|1995|pp=12–13}}

Many Greek and Roman authors wrote about these scripts, and many were aware that the Egyptians had two or three writing systems, but none whose works survived into later times fully understood how the scripts worked. [[Diodorus Siculus]], in the first century{{nbsp}}BC, explicitly described hieroglyphs as an ideographic script, and most classical authors shared this assumption. [[Plutarch]], in the first century AD, referred to 25 Egyptian letters, suggesting he might have been aware of the phonetic aspect of hieroglyphic or demotic, but his meaning is unclear.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=17–18}} Around AD{{nbsp}}200 [[Clement of Alexandria]] hinted that some signs were phonetic but concentrated on the signs' metaphorical meanings. [[Plotinus]], in the third century AD, claimed hieroglyphs did not represent words but a divinely inspired, fundamental insight into the nature of the objects they depicted.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=45–46}} In the following century [[Ammianus Marcellinus]] in the fourth century AD copied another author's translation of a hieroglyphic text on an [[obelisk]], but the translation was too loose to be useful in understanding the principles of the writing system.{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=19}} The only extensive discussion of hieroglyphs to survive into modern times was the ''[[Hieroglyphica]]'', a work probably written in the fourth century AD and attributed to a man named [[Horapollo]]. It discusses the meanings of individual hieroglyphs, though not how those signs were used to form phrases or sentences. Some of the meanings it describes are correct, but more are wrong, and all are misleadingly explained as allegories. For instance, Horapollo says an image of a goose means "son" because geese are said to love their children more than other animals. In fact the goose hieroglyph was used because the Egyptian words for "goose" and "son" incorporated the same consonants.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=47–49}}

Both hieroglyphic and demotic began to disappear in the third century AD.{{sfn|Loprieno|1995|p=26}} The temple-based priesthoods died out and [[Decline of ancient Egyptian religion|Egypt was gradually converted to Christianity]], and because [[Egyptian Christians]] wrote in the Greek-derived [[Coptic alphabet]], it came to supplant demotic. The [[Graffito of Esmet-Akhom|last hieroglyphic text]] was written by priests at the Temple of [[Isis]] at [[Philae]] in AD{{nbsp}}394, and the last known demotic text was inscribed there in AD{{nbsp}}452.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=26, 30–31}}

Most of history before the first millennium{{nbsp}}BC was recorded in Egyptian scripts or in [[cuneiform]], the writing system of [[Mesopotamia]]. With the loss of knowledge of both these scripts, the only records of the distant past were in limited and distorted sources.{{sfn|Griffith|1951|pp=38–39}} The major Egyptian example of such a source was ''[[Manetho#Aegyptiaca (Manetho)|Aegyptiaca]]'', a history of the country written by an Egyptian priest named [[Manetho]] in the third century{{nbsp}}BC. The original text was [[Lost literary work|lost]], and it survived only in summaries[[Epitome|epitomes]] and quotations by Roman authors.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=22–23}}

The [[Coptic language]], the last form of the Egyptian language, continued to be spoken by most Egyptians well after the [[Arab conquest of Egypt]] in AD{{nbsp}}642, but it gradually lost ground to [[Arabic language|Arabic]]. Coptic began to die out in the twelfth century, and thereafter it survived mainly as the [[liturgical language]] of the [[Coptic Church]].{{sfn|Hamilton|2006|pp=27–29, 195}}

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==Early efforts==

===Medieval Islamic world===

[[File:IbnParis, Wahshiyya'sBnf 985man CEArabe translation6805 offol. the92v-93v AncientShawq Egyptianal-Mustaham hieroglyphAttempted alphabettranslation of hieroglyphs.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Hieroglyphs with Arabic characters|thumb|[[Ibn Wahshiyya]]'s attempted translation of hieroglyphs]]

Arab scholars were aware of the connection between Coptic and the ancient Egyptian language, and [[Coptic monks]] in Islamic times were sometimes believed to understand the ancient scripts.{{sfn|El-Daly|2005|p=66}} Several Arab scholars in the seventh through fourteenth centuries, including [[Jabir ibn Hayyan]] and [[Ayub ibn Maslama]], are said to have understood hieroglyphs,{{sfn|El-Daly|2005|pp=66–67}} although because their works on the subject have not survived these claims cannot be tested.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=51–52}} [[Dhul-Nun al-Misri]] and [[Ibn Wahshiyya]], in the ninth and tenth centuries, wrote treatises containing dozens of scripts known in the [[Islamic world]], including hieroglyphs, with tables listing their meanings. In the thirteenth or fourteenth century, [[Abu al-Qasim al-Iraqi]] copied an ancient Egyptian text and assigned phonetic values to several hieroglyphs. {{sfn|El-Daly|2005|pp=67–69}}

The Egyptologist Okasha El-Daly has argued that the tables of hieroglyphs in the works of Ibn Wahshiyya and Abu al-Qasim correctly identified the meaning of many of the signs.{{sfn|El-Daly|2005|ppp=67–69, 72}} Other scholars have been sceptical of Ibn Wahshiyya's claims to understand the scripts he wrote about, and Tara Stephan, a scholar of the [[medieval Islamic world]], says El-Daly "vastly overemphasizes Ibn Waḥshiyya's accuracy".{{sfn|Stephan|2017|pp=264–264264–265}} Ibn Wahshiyya and Abu al-Qasim did recognise that hieroglyphs could function phonetically as well as symbolically, a point that would not be acknowledged in Europe for centuries.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=52, 59}}{{sfn|El-Daly|2005|p=72}}

===Fifteenth through seventeenth centuries===

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The first European to make sense of Coptic was a German [[Jesuit]] and [[polymath]], [[Athanasius Kircher]], in the mid-seventeenth century.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|p=93}} Basing his work on Arabic grammars and dictionaries of Coptic acquired in Egypt by an Italian traveller, [[Pietro Della Valle]], Kircher produced flawed but pioneering translations and grammars of the language in the 1630s and 1640s. He guessed that Coptic was derived from the language of the ancient Egyptians, and his work on the subject was preparation for his ultimate goal, decipherment of the hieroglyphic script.{{sfn|Hamilton|2006|pp=201, 205–210}}

According to the standard biographical dictionary of [[Egyptology]], "Kircher has become, perhaps unfairly, the symbol of all that is absurd and fantastic in the story of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs".{{sfn|Bierbrier|2012|p=296}} Kircher thought the Egyptians had believed in an [[prisca theologia|ancient theological tradition]] that preceded and foreshadowed Christianity, and he hoped to understand this tradition through hieroglyphs.{{sfn|Hamilton|2006|pp=226–227}} Like his Renaissance predecessors, he believed hieroglyphs represented an abstract form of communication rather than a language. To translate such a system of communication in a self-consistent way was impossible.{{sfn|Stolzenberg|2013|pp=198–199, 224–225}} Therefore, in his works on hieroglyphs, such as ''[[Oedipus Aegyptiacus]]'' (1652–1655), Kircher proceeded by guesswork based on his understanding of [[Ancient Egyptian religion|ancient Egyptian beliefs]], derived from the Coptic texts he had read and from ancient texts that he thought contained traditions derived from Egypt.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=95–96, 98}} His translations turned short texts containing only a few hieroglyphic characters into lengthy sentences of esoteric ideas.{{sfn|Stolzenberg|2013|p=203}} Unlike earlier European scholars, Kircher did realise that hieroglyphs could function phonetically,{{sfn|El-Daly|2005|p=58}} though he considered this function a late development.{{sfn|Stolzenberg|2013|p=203}} He also recognised one hieroglyph, 𓈗, as representing water and thus standing phonetically for the Coptic word for water, ''mu'', as well as the ''m'' sound. He became the first European to correctly identify a phonetic value for a hieroglyph.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=96–97}}

Although Kircher's basic assumptions were shared by his contemporaries, most scholars rejected or even ridiculed his translations.{{sfn|Stolzenberg|2013|pp=227–230}} Nevertheless, his argument that Coptic was derived from the ancient Egyptian language was widely accepted.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=98–99}}

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Hardly anyone attempted to decipher hieroglyphs for decades after Kircher's last works on the subject, although some contributed suggestions about the script that ultimately proved correct.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=98–99}} [[William Warburton]]'s religious treatise ''[[The Divine Legation of Moses]]'', published from 1738 to 1741, included a long digression on hieroglyphs and the evolution of writing. It argued that hieroglyphs were not invented to encode religious secrets but for practical purposes, like any other writing system, and that the phonetic Egyptian script mentioned by Clement of Alexandria was derived from them.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=48–49}} Warburton's approach, though purely theoretical,{{sfn|Iversen|1993|p=105}} created the framework for understanding hieroglyphs that would dominate scholarship for the rest of the century.{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=53}}

Europeans' contact with Egypt increased during the eighteenth century. More of them visited the country and saw its ancient inscriptions firsthand,{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=75}} and as they collected antiquities, the number of texts available for study increased.{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=43}} [[:fr:{{ill|Jean-Pierre Rigord|Jean-Pierre Rigord]]fr}} became the first European to identify a non-hieroglyphic ancient Egyptian text in 1704, and [[Bernard de Montfaucon]] published a large collection of such texts in 1724.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=43–45}} [[Anne Claude de Caylus]] collected and published a large number of Egyptian inscriptions from 1752 to 1767, assisted by [[Jean-Jacques Barthélemy]]. Their work noted that non-hieroglyphic Egyptian scripts seemed to contain signs derived from hieroglyphs. Barthélemy also pointed out the oval rings, later to be known as [[cartouche]]s, that enclosed small groups of signs in many hieroglyphic texts, and in 1762 he suggested that cartouches contained the names of kings or gods. [[Carsten Niebuhr]], who visited Egypt in the 1760s, produced the first systematic, though incomplete, list of distinct hieroglyphic signs. He also pointed out the distinction between hieroglyphic text and the illustrations that accompanied it, whereas earlier scholars had confused the two.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=53–54}} [[Joseph de Guignes]], one of several scholars of the time who speculated that [[Chinese culture]] had some historical connection to ancient Egypt, believed [[Chinese writing]] was an offshoot of hieroglyphs. In 1785 he repeated Barthélémy's suggestion about cartouches, comparing it with a Chinese practice that set proper names apart from the surrounding text.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=106–107}}

[[Georg Zoëga|Jørgen Zoëga]], the most knowledgeable scholar of Coptic in the late eighteenth century, made several insights about hieroglyphs in ''De origine et usu obeliscorum'' (1797), a compendium of knowledge about ancient Egypt. He catalogued hieroglyphic signs and concluded that there were too few distinct signs for each one to represent a single word, so to produce a full vocabulary they must have each had multiple meanings or changed meaning by combining with each other. He saw that the direction the signs faced indicated the direction in which a text was meant to be read, and he suggested that some signs were phonetic. Zoëga did not attempt to decipher the script, believing that doing so would require more evidence than was available in Europe at the time.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=57–59}}

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[[File:RosettaStoneAsPartOfOriginalStele revised.svg|thumb|upright|alt=The Rosetta Stone with the missing upper and lower portions outlined|A reconstruction of the [[Rosetta Stone]] stela as it may have originally appeared, with all three registers intact]]

{{main|Rosetta Stone}}

When French forces under [[Napoleon Bonaparte]] [[French campaign in Egypt and Syria|invaded Egypt]] in 1798, Bonaparte brought with him a [[Commission des Sciences et des Arts|corps of scientists and scholars]], generally known as the ''savants'', to study the land and its ancient monuments.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=98–99}} In July 1799, when French soldiers were rebuilding a [[Mamluk Sultanate (Cairo)|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 an[[demotic unidentified script(Egyptian)|demotic]] in the middle.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=2–3}}{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|p=20}} The text was a [[Rosetta Stone decree|decree]] issued in 197{{nbsp}}BC 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 [[Egyptian temple|temples]].{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|pp=29–30}} 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.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=4–5}} 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.{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|p=20}}{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=27–28}}

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.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=9, 24–26}}

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 Empire|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.{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|pp=20–22}}

Reports from Napoleon's expedition spurred [[EgyptomaniaAncient Egypt in the Western imagination|a mania for ancient Egypt]] in Europe. Egypt was chaotic in the wake of the French and British withdrawal, but after [[Muhammad Ali of Egypt|Muhammad Ali]] took control of the country in 1805, European collectors descended on Egypt and carried away numerous antiquities, while artists copied others.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=108, 132–134}} No one knew these artefacts' historical context,{{sfn|Robinson|2012|p=11}} but they contributed to the corpus of texts that scholars could compare when trying to decipher the writing systems.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=119, 124}}

===De Sacy, Åkerblad and Young===

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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.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=47–51}} 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.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=110}} De Sacy was sceptical of his results, and Åkerblad too gave up.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=47–51}} Despite attempts by other scholars, little further progress was made until more than a decade later, when [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]] entered the field.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=111}}

[[File:Thomas Young by Briggs.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Refer to caption|Portrait of [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]] 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.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=111}} 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.{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=121–122}}{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=67}} Young spent months copying other Egyptian texts, which enabled him to see patterns in them that others missed.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=155–156}} 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.{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=67}}

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.{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=67}}{{refn|Young and other scholars recognised that hieratic represented an intermediate stage between hieroglyphic and demotic, but its exact nature, and whether it should be regarded as a distinct script from demotic, remained disputed throughout the period in which Young and Champollion were working.{{sfn|Buchwald|Josefowicz|2020|pp=137, 237}}|group="Note"}} 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.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=135, 141}} In his 1802 publication de Sacy had said hieroglyphs might function phonetically when writing foreign words.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=110}} In 1811 he suggested, after learning about a similar practice in Chinese writing,{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=66}} that a cartouche signified a word written phonetically—such as the name of a non-Egyptian ruler like Ptolemy.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=153–154}} 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.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=159–161}} 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.{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=153–154}} The result was a set of thirteen phonetic values for hieroglyphic and demotic signs. Six were correct, three partly correct, and four wrong.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=159–161}}

{| class="wikitable" style="margin:1em auto;"

|-

|+ style="text-align: center" | Young's analysis of the cartouche of Ptolemy{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=159–161}}

! colspan=8 |
{| <table class= border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center">

| [[File:Hiero_Ca1.svg|alt=|link=]]

<tr>

| <!----Lines and hieroglyphs:---->

<td> [[File:Hiero_Ca1.svg|alt=|link=]]</td>

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"

<td> <!----Lines and hieroglyphs:---->

| height="2px" style="background-color:black" |

<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">

|-

<tr>

| <td height="2px45" style="background-colorpadding:black0;" | <hiero>p:t-wA-l:M-i-i-s</tdhiero>

|-

</tr>

| height="2px" style="background-color:black" |

<tr>

|}

<td height="45" style="padding:0;"> <hiero>p:t-wA-l:M-i-i-s</hiero></td>

|

</tr>

| style="text-align:center;text-valign:middle;" | [[File:Hiero_Ca2.svg|alt=|link=]]

<tr>

|}

<td height="2px" style="background-color:black"></td>

</tr>

</table>

</td>

<td></td>

<td style="text-align:center;text-valign:middle;"> [[File:Hiero_Ca2.svg|alt=|link=]]</td>

</tr>

</table>

|-

| '''Hieroglyph''' || style="width: 4em;" | <hiero>p</hiero> || style="width: 4em;" | <hiero>t</hiero> || style="width: 4em;" | <hiero>wA</hiero> || style="width: 4em;" | <hiero>l</hiero> || style="width: 4em;" | <hiero>M</hiero> || style="width: 4em;" | <hiero>i-i</hiero> || style="width: 4em;" | <hiero>s</hiero>

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| '''Young's reading''' || P || T || inessential || LO or OLE || MA or M || I || OSH or OS

|}

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.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=161–162}} 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."{{sfn|Griffith|1951|p=41}} 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.{{sfn|Ray|2007|pp=49–51}}

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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 [[homophone]]s, different signs spelling the same sound. He proceeded to test these letters in other cartouches, identify the names of many Greek and Roman rulers of Egypt and extrapolate the values of still more letters.{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=173–175}}

{| class="wikitable" style="margin:1em auto;"

|-

|+ style="text-align: center" | Champollion's analysis of the cartouche of Ptolemy{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|p=173}}

! colspan=8 |
{| <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center">

| [[File:Hiero_Ca1.svg|alt=|link=]]

<tr>

| <!----Lines and hieroglyphs:---->

<td> [[File:Hiero_Ca1.svg|alt=|link=]]</td>

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"

<td> <!----Lines and hieroglyphs:---->

| height="2px" style="background-color:black" |

<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">

|-

<tr>

| <td height="2px45" style="background-colorpadding:black0;" | <hiero>p:t-wA-l:M-i-i-s</tdhiero>

|-

</tr>

| height="2px" style="background-color:black" |

<tr>

|}

<td height="45" style="padding:0;"> <hiero>p:t-wA-l:M-i-i-s</hiero></td>

|

</tr>

| style="text-align:center;text-valign:middle;" | [[File:Hiero_Ca2.svg|alt=|link=]]

<tr>

|}

<td height="2px" style="background-color:black"></td>

</tr>

</table>

</td>

<td></td>

<td style="text-align:center;text-valign:middle;"> [[File:Hiero_Ca2.svg|alt=|link=]]</td>

</tr>

</table>

|-

| '''Hieroglyph''' || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>p</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>t</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>wA</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>l</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>M</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>i-i</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>s</hiero>

Line 135 ⟶ 124:

| '''Champollion's reading''' || P || T || O || L || M || E || S

|}

{| class="wikitable" style="margin:1em auto;"

|-

|+ style="text-align: center" | Champollion's analysis of the cartouche of Cleopatra{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=136–137, 144}}{{sfn|Allen|2014|p=10}}

! colspan=11 |
{| <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center">

| [[File:Hiero_Ca1.svg|alt=|link=]]

<tr>

| <!----Lines and hieroglyphs:---->

<td> [[File:Hiero_Ca1.svg|alt=|link=]]</td>

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"

<td> <!----Lines and hieroglyphs:---->

| height="2px" style="background-color:black" |

<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">

|-

<tr>

| <td height="2px45" style="background-colorpadding:black0;" | <hiero>q:l-i-wA-p-A-d:r-A-t:H8</tdhiero>

|-

</tr>

| height="2px" style="background-color:black" |

<tr>

|}

<td height="45" style="padding:0;"> <hiero>q:l-i-wA-p-A-d:r-A-t:H8</hiero></td>

|

</tr>

| style="text-align:center;text-valign:middle;" | [[File:Hiero_Ca2.svg|alt=|link=]]

<tr>

|}

<td height="2px" style="background-color:black"></td>

|-

</tr>

| '''Hieroglyph''' || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>q</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>l</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>i</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>wA</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>p</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>A</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>d</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>r</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>A</hiero> ||style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>t:H8</hiero>

</table>

</td>

<td></td>

<td style="text-align:center;text-valign:middle;"> [[File:Hiero_Ca2.svg|alt=|link=]]</td>

</tr>

</table>

|-

| '''Hieroglyph''' || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>q</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>l</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>i</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>wA</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>p</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>A</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>d</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>r</hiero> || style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>A</hiero> ||style="width: 3em;" | <hiero>t:H8</hiero>

|-

| '''Champollion's reading''' || K || L || E || O || P || A || T || R || A || Feminine ending

|}

Line 171 ⟶ 152:

{{Hiero|Ramesses{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=180–181}}|<hiero>ra-ms-s-s</hiero> |align=right|era=egypt}}

{{Hiero|Thutmose{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=180–181}}|<hiero>G26-ms-s</hiero> |align=right|era=egypt}}

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.{{sfn|Buchwald|Josefowicz|2020|p=385}} 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, long 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!''{{hsp}}" ("I've done it!") and collapsed in a days-long faint.{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=180–181}}{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=140–142}}{{refn|The earliest version of the story of Champollion's exclamation and fainting comes from an account written by an author named Adolphe Rochas in 1856, according to which Champollion was working on notes for the ''Lettre'' when it took place. Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac's son, Aimé, repeated Rochas's account several years later, and Jacques-Joseph may have been the source for both. Hartleben's account is the earliest to connect the event to Huyot's inscription copies.{{sfn|Buchwald|Josefowicz|2020|pp=372, 385, 509}}|group="Note"}}

[[File:Tableau Général des signes et groupes hieroglyphiques No 125 (color).jpg|thumb|right|Hieroglyphic and [[cuneiform]] 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]].{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=72–74, 100–101}}

Around this time Champollion made a second breakthrough.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=148–149}} 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 [[Orthographic ligature|ligatures]] to form a full vocabulary. Few hieroglyphs seemed to be ligatures. And 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.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=75–78}}{{refn|Hartleben said that according to an established "tradition" Champollion came to this realisation on his birthday, 23 December 1821. [[W. Andrew Robinson|Andrew Robinson]], author of a more recent biography, argues that this date is too early, given that the ''Lettre à M. Dacier'', written the following September, gives no indication that hieroglyphs were used phonetically outside the cartouches. Robinson suggests Champollion might instead have realised the extent of phoneticism in December 1822, when his work was more advanced.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=148–149}} [[Jed Z. Buchwald]] and Diance Greco Josefowicz argue that there is no sign in the primary documents that the breakthrough came earlier than March 1823.{{sfn|Buchwald|Josefowicz|2020|p=422}}|group="Note"}}

Line 187 ⟶ 168:

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.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=121}} The scholar who held out longest against Champollion's decipherment was [[Gustav Seyffarth]].{{sfn|Thompson|2015b|p=202}} His opposition to Champollion culminated in a public argument with him in 1826,{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=232–234}} and he continued to advocate his own approach to hieroglyphs until his death in 1885.{{sfn|Thompson|2015b|p=202}}

As the nature of hieroglyphs became clearer, detractors of this kind fell away, but the argumentdebate 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.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=121–123}} The Egyptologist [[Richard B. Parkinson|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."{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|p=40}}

==Reading texts==

Line 199 ⟶ 180:

Antiquarians living in Egypt, especially [[John Gardner Wilkinson]], were already applying Champollion's findings to the texts there. Champollion and Rosellini wanted to do so themselves, and together with some other scholars and artists they formed the Franco-Tuscan Expedition to Egypt.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=149–151, 166}} En route to Egypt Champollion stopped to look at a papyrus in the hands of a French antiquities dealer. It was a copy of the ''[[Instructions of Amenemhat|Instructions of King Amenemhat]]'', a work of [[sebayt|wisdom literature]] cast as posthumous advice from [[Amenemhat I]] to his son and successor. It became the first work of [[ancient Egyptian literature]] to be read, although Champollion could not read it well enough to fully understand what it was.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=181–182}} In 1828 and 1829 the expedition travelled the length of the Egyptian course of the Nile, copying and collecting antiquities.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=166–170}} After studying countless texts Champollion felt certain that his system was applicable to hieroglyphic texts from every period of Egyptian history, and he apparently coined the term "determinative" while there.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=200, 213}}

After returning from Egypt, Champollion spent much of his time working on a full description of the Egyptian language, but he had little time to complete it. Beginning in late 1831 he suffered a series of increasingly debilitating strokes, and he died in March 1832.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=226, 235}}

===Mid-nineteenth century===

[[File:Grammaire Egyptienne by Jean Francois Champollion, 1836 - National Cryptologic Museum - DSC07733.JPG|thumb|right|alt=An open book|Champollion's ''[[Grammaire égyptienne]]'']]

[[File:Denkstroeme-heft16 beitraege richter 2.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Refer to caption|Portrait of [[Karl Richard Lepsius]] around 1850, by Alexander Alboth]]

Champollion-Figeac published his brother's [[Grammaire égyptienne|grammar of Egyptian]] and an accompanying dictionary in instalments from 1836 to 1843. Both were incomplete, especially the dictionary, which was confusingly organised and contained many conjectural translations.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=239–242}} These works' deficiencies reflected the incomplete state of understanding of Egyptian upon Champollion's death.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=175}} Champollion often went astray by overestimating the similarity between classical Egyptian and Coptic. As Griffith put it in 1922, "In reality Coptic is a remote derivative from ancient Egyptian, like French from Latin; in some cases, therefore, Champollion's provisional transcripts produced good Coptic words, while mostly they were more or less meaningless or impossible, and in transcribing phrases either Coptic syntax was hopelessly violated or the order of hieroglyphic words had to be inverted. This was all very baffling and misleading."{{sfn|Griffith|1951|p=45}} Champollion was also unaware that signs could spell two or three consonants as well as one. Instead he thought every phonetic sign represented one sound and each sound had a great many homophones. Thus the middle sign in the cartouches of Ramesses and Thutmose was biliteral, representing the consonant sequence ''ms'', but Champollion read it as ''m''. Neither had he struck upon the concept now known as a "phonetic complement": a uniliteral sign that was added at the end of a word, re-spelling a sound that had already been written out in a different way.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|p=243}}

Line 210 ⟶ 191:

The scholar who corrected the most fundamental faults in Champollion's work was [[Karl Richard Lepsius]], a Prussian philologist who began studying the Egyptian language using Champollion's grammar. He struck up a friendship with Rosellini and began corresponding with him about the language.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=198–199}} Lepsius's ''Lettre à M. le Professeur H. Rosellini sur l'Alphabet hiéroglyphique'', which he published in 1837, explained the functions of biliteral signs, triliteral signs and phonetic complements, although those terms had not yet been coined. It listed 30 uniliteral signs, compared with more than 200 in Champollion's system and 24 in the modern understanding of the hieroglyphic script.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=244–245}} Lepsius's letter greatly strengthened the case for Champollion's general approach to hieroglyphs while correcting its deficiencies, and it definitively moved the focus of Egyptology from decipherment to translation.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=199}} Champollion, Rosellini and Lepsius are often considered the founders of Egyptology; Young is sometimes included as well.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|p=243}}

Lepsius was one of a new generation of Egyptologists who emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=198}} [[Emmanuel de Rougé]], who began studying Egyptian in 1839, was the first person to translate a full-length ancient Egyptian text; he published the first translations of Egyptian literary texts in 1856. In the words of one of de Rougé's students, [[Gaston Maspero]], "de Rougé gave us the method which allowed us to utilise and bring to perfection the method of Champollion".{{sfn|Bierbrier|2012|p=476}} Other scholars concentrated on the lesser-known scripts. [[Heinrich Brugsch]] was the first since Young's death to advance the study of demotic, publishing a grammar of it in 1855.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=272–273}} [[Charles Wycliffe Goodwin]]'s essay "Hieratic Papyri", published in 1858,{{sfn|Bierbrier|2012|p=217}} was the first major contribution to that subject.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=268}} It emphasizedemphasised that hieratic texts, not monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions, were the richest source for understanding the Egyptian language. Goodwin and his contemporary [[François Chabas]] greatly advanced the study of hieratic.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=268–269}}

In 1866 Lepsius discovered the [[Canopus Decree]], a parallel text like the Rosetta Stone whose inscriptions were all largely intact. The hieroglyphs could now be compared directly with their Greek translation, and the results proved the validity of Champollion'sthe established approach to Egyptian beyond reasonable doubt.{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|pp=41–42}} [[Samuel Birch (Egyptologist)|Samuel Birch]], the foremost figure in British Egyptology during the mid-nineteenth century, published the first extensive dictionary of Egyptian in 1867, and in the same year Brugsch published the first volume of his dictionary of both hieroglyphic and demotic.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=211, 273}} Brugsch's dictionary established the modern understanding of the sounds of the Egyptian language, which draws upon the phonology of Semitic languages as Hincks suggested.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|p=245}} Egyptologists have continued to refine their understanding of the language up to the present,{{sfn|Loprieno|1995|pp=8–9}}{{sfn|Allen|2014|p=11}} but by this time it was on firm ground.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=273}} Together with the decipherment of cuneiform in the same century, the decipherment of ancient Egyptian had opened the way for the study of the earliest stages of human history.{{sfn|Griffith|1951|pp=38–39}}

==Notes==

Line 223 ⟶ 204:

===Works cited===

{{refbegin|30em}}

*{{cite book |author1-last=Adkins |author1-first=Lesley |author2-last=Adkins |author2-first=Roy |author1-link=Roy and Lesley Adkins |author2-link=Roy and Lesley Adkins|title=The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs |year=2000 |publisher=HarperCollins |isbn=978-0-06-019439-0 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/keysofegyptobses00adki }}

*{{cite book |last=Allen |first=James P. |authorlink=James Peter Allen|title=Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, Third Edition |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2014 |isbn=978-1-107-05364-9 |url=https://archive.org/details/ALLEN2014MiddleEgyptianAnIntroductionToTheLanguageAndCultureOfHieroglyphs/page/n1 }}

*{{cite book |editor-last=Bierbrier |editor-first=Morris L. |title=Who Was Who in Egyptology, 4th Revised Edition |year=2012 |publisher=Egypt Exploration Society |isbn=978-0-85698-207-1 }}

*{{cite book |author-link=Jed Buchwald|author1-last=Buchwald |author1-first=Jed Z. |author2-last=Josefowicz |author2-first=Diane Greco |title=The Riddle of the Rosetta: How an English Polymath and a French Polyglot Discovered the Meaning of Egyptian Hieroglyphs |year=2020 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-0-691-20091-0 }}

Line 230 ⟶ 211:

*{{cite book |last=El-Daly |first=Okasha |title=Egyptology: The Missing Millennium |year=2005 |publisher=UCL Press |isbn=978-1-84472-062-0 }}

*{{cite journal |last=Griffith |first=Francis Llewellyn |author-link=Francis Llewellyn Griffith |title=The Decipherment of the Hieroglyphs |date=1951 |orig-year=Reprint of "The Centenary of Egyptology" in ''The Times Literary Supplement'', 1922 |journal=The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology |volume=37 |pages=38–46 |jstor=3855155 |url=https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.40592/page/n55 |doi=10.2307/3855155 }}

*{{cite book |last=Hamilton |first=Alastair |authorlink=Alastair Hamilton |title=The Copts and the West, 1439–1822: The European Discovery of the Egyptian Church |year=2006 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-928877-9 }}

*{{cite book |last=Iversen |first=Erik |title=The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition |year=1993 |orig-year=First edition 1961 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-0-691-02124-9 }}

*{{cite book |last=Loprieno |first=Antonio |authorlink=Antonio Loprieno |title=Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction |year=1995 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-44384-5 }}

*{{cite book |last=Parkinson |first=Richard |authorlink=Richard B. Parkinson |title=Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment |others=Contributions by Whitfield Diffie, Mary Fischer, and R. S. Simpson |year=1999 |publisher=British Museum Press |isbn=978-0-7141-1916-8 |url=https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_QD9g1mMaAAsC_2 }}

*{{cite book |last=Pope |first=Maurice |authorlink=Maurice Pope (linguist) |title=The Story of Decipherment, from Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script, Revised Edition |year=1999 |orig-year=First edition 1975 |publisher=Thames & Hudson |isbn=978-0-500-28105-5 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/storyofdecipherm00pope }}

*{{cite book |last=Ray |first=John D. |authorlink=John D. Ray |title=The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt |year=2007 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-02493-9 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/rosettastonerebi0000rayj }}

*{{cite book |last=Robinson |first=Andrew |author-link=W. Andrew Robinson |title=The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, among Other Feats of Genius |year=2006 |publisher=Pi Press |isbn=978-0-13-134304-7 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/lastmanwhoknewev00robi }}

*{{cite book |last=Robinson |first=Andrew |title=Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion |year=2012 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-991499-9 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/crackingegyptian00robi }}

*{{cite book |author1-last=Solé |author1-first=Robert |author1-link=Robert Solé|author2-last=Valbelle |author2-first=Dominique |translator=Steven Rendall |title=The Rosetta Stone: The Story of the Decoding of Hieroglyphics |url=https://archive.org/details/rosettastone0000sole |url-access=registration |year=2002 |orig-year=French edition 1999 |publisher=Four Walls Eight Windows |isbn=978-1-56858-226-9 }}

*{{cite book |last=Stephan |first=Tara |chapter=Writing the Past: Ancient Egypt through the Lens of Medieval Islamic Thought |editor1-last=Lowry |editor1-first=Joseph E. |editor2-last=Toorawa |editor2-first=Shawkat M. |title=Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought: Essays in Honor of Everett K. Rowson |year=2017 |publisher=Brill |isbn=978-90-04-34329-0 }}

*{{cite book |last=Stolzenberg |first=Daniel |title=Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity |year=2013 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-92415-1 }}

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{{featured article}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Decipherment Of Hieroglyphic Writing}}

[[Category:Egyptian languages]]

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[[Category:History of writing]]

[[Category:Ancient languages]]

[[Category:Decipherment]]

[[Category:Rosetta Stone]]